Gitroom

Welcome to a new edition of Open Pioneers - your weekly update from the forefront of open source. Today, we talk about:

• Gitroom: Grow your open source projects

• New open source projects, including:

  • Statusnook: Effortlessly deploy a status page and start monitoring endpoints in minutes

  • Glance: A selfhosted dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place

  • Chatbot: Free and open source mobile private ChatGPT application, supporting GPT3, GPT4 & Gemini Pro models

• IBM acquires HashiCorp - What does this mean for Terraform & Vault?

• “Open-washing” of Llama 3?

Since last week, we have welcomed 23 new Open Pioneers. 👋 If you like this week's post, it would make my day if you would share it with a friend or colleague.

🔍 Gitroom: Grow your open source project

Gitroom is an open source platform created by Nevo David, the former head of growth at Novu, to help open-source founders and maintainers achieve growth for their projects.

Nevo David (@nevodavid) created Gitroom based on his experience growing Novu to over 31,000 GitHub stars. He found the process of writing articles, timing promotions, and coordinating launches to be stressful and inefficient. Gitroom aims to streamline these tasks and provide a centralized platform for open-source growth and community building.

Here are a few things you can do with Gitroom:

• Schedule social media posts and articles in advance on platforms like Reddit, DEV, or Hashnode

• Exchange or buy posts from other community members and influencers

• Add testimonials and "used by" sections with other open-source friends

• Automatically generate media for stats like GitHub stars

The project is open-source, built with technologies like NX (monorepo), Next.js, Nest.js, Prisma, Redis, and Resend. Gitroom offers a blog with growth tips, an "awesome list" for promotion, a newsletter, and a Discord community to connect founders and maintainers.

Learn more: Website | GitHub | Twitter

🔥 New open source projects started last week

💰 IBM acquires HashiCorp - What does this mean for Terraform & Vault?

IBM has acquired HashiCorp, the company behind popular open source tools like Terraform and Vault, for $6.4 billion. The acquisition triggered debates wtithin the open source community regarding the future licensing of HashiCorp's products, particularly Terraform.

Last year, HashiCorp adopted the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 for its products, moving away from the more permissive Mozilla Public License 2.0. This decision led to backlash, with the Linux Foundation creating a Terraform fork called OpenTofu.

Some experts believe IBM's acquisition could lead to a reversal of HashiCorp's licensing decision, potentially returning Terraform to an open source license like Apache 2.0. However, given IBM's focus on enterprise customers, it can be doubted if this is going to happen.

While some folks from the open source community view the acquisition as a potential lifeline for Terraform, reuniting it with OpenTofu, others argue that the licensing controversy is a "red herring" and that IBM is unlikely to change HashiCorp's course. I personally belong to the latter group.

🦙 “Open-washing” of Llama 3?

Meta's release of Llama 3, touted as the most powerful open source language model, has sparked a debate around its true open-source nature.

While Meta claims Llama 3 is open-source, several concerns have been raised:

1) Meta has not provided full access to the training data used for Llama 3, which is important for understanding the model's limitations and potential biases.

2) Llama 3 is released under a custom license, which is incompatible with open source principles and hinders companies from using it.

These restrictions have led to accusations of "open-washing," where Llama 3 is marketed as "open" despite falling short of openness standards. Parts of the community called for Meta to adopt widely recognized open source licenses and provide full disclosure of the training data, along with documentation.

Follow some of the discussion: [GitHub 1] [GitHub 2] [Hugging Face] [Reddit]

📚 More open source content

• The hyper-clouds are open source's friends Link

• Focusing on the wrong open source issues Link

• Open Source world's Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License Link

• The end of vendor-backed open source? Link

• Arthur Mensch: Open vs Closed - Who Wins and Mistral's Position Link

Until next week,

Jonathan (@jonathimer)