Why open source? 

Experienced development companies are always busy with paid projects for clients. Naturally, those are always prioritized, because, contrary to popular belief developers are people, too, and as such they need to eat… Therefore, it’s easy to overlook interesting open–source projects and opportunities because they do not bring in direct revenue most of the time.  

Still, at pixely, we believe giving back is important. Thus, we help our development team allocate the time, space and budget to contribute to open–source projects, as well. We would even dare to say that it’s the duty of every developer to contribute to the open–source community by participating in projects, however sporadic and small those contributions may be.  

In well-established industries like geospatial and insurance where most developers are pursuing commercial projects, getting involved in open–source projects can help disrupt the way things have been done for decades and bring much needed innovations to those fields. Also, growing the community by removing the entry barrier is positively impacting the entire industry, especially the end users. 

The goodwill of open source 

At pixely, we strongly believe that open source and open access projects are a benefit to humanity. So many significant, realized projects which likely wouldn’t have been developed at all as they lacked commercial support, were built by the community as open source. Projects financed by public funds should be provided to the users in a non-commercial way. 

Furthermore, the availability of well-executed, open–source solutions means everyone can access and use them, as they’re not only restricted to large corporations or well-paying clients. Non-profit organizations, academic institutions and charitable foundations don’t have the means to have their own solutions developed, or even to license existing solutions in many cases. Open source helps them meet their goals and deliver their missions, which benefits greater society, and the less privileged – something we all profit from, in the end.  

Why is involvement in open–source projects important? 

First, it helps the open–source community get things done more quickly, by reusing existing components. Second, it helps developers stay sharp and gain new skills that could be used in commercial projects going forward – a win-win scenario for development houses.  

As a company, pixely is not only working on paid projects and products but we’re actively supporting the community by participating in open–source projects and building open–source components as well. This helps us build better, more innovative and more effective client solutions. We apply scrum and agile development methodologies to all our projects – both commercial and open source. This ensures that we can manage our workload and still find the time to contribute to community work.  

Recent open–source projects we’re proud of 

Security and credential management is a key component of any modern solution. Keycloak is a well-known code package for managing user access and authentication. Pixely uses it for client projects and contributing to it is beneficial both to our clients and the development community.  As part of pixely’s open–source development efforts, we recently worked on a connector for the standard Keycloak engine, which can be found on GitHub or in NPM repository.  

The future of open source at pixely 

In addition to our standard development services, pixely also offers consulting and support services for open source and open access development projects that we are involved in. We are publishing our open–source projects on the distribution platform NPM and Github, and to make things even easier, soon we will also make links to our open–source packages available on our website at https://pixely.group/open-source-software. Any developer or organization who is interested in using our open code base contributions will be able to access them via these channels.   

For more information on pixely’s open–source work, you are welcome to get in touch with us.