Most people will agree that, in its simplest form, Open Source Software (OSS) is a software that has its source code available. The Open Source Initiative has a list of ten criteria defining even more open source, which we agree and follow by using the MIT license for all the source code we release. For us, Open Source is much more than the code.
We firmly believe that open source isn't just about the code: it's a mindset. It's how we do business and it's how we give back to the tech community.
First, we are including the community in everything we do: public is the default visibility of our work. We plan the future of Meilisearch with the help and feedback of everyone who wants to be involved. It is possible to suggest a feature idea to influence the roadmap. We sincerely welcome pull requests, even when it's about a feature that wasn't a priority for us, as a for-profit company. Contributing doesn't only equal code: it's also about making us aware of any problems with our product by creating issues on GitHub or being part of our lovely Discord community. Note that we will have more documentation on the best ways to contribute to Meilisearch.
Obviously, we can do even more, so it's why starting from v0.21, we are moving forward with a public specifications process that will close the loop on involving the community and being totally transparent with everything we do product-wise.
This, all this, is what we consider being open source.
As someone you may know would say “With great power comes great responsibility" and it cannot be truer. By adopting the public by default approach, we are prone to mistakes. It's fine. It will happen, no matter how experienced our teams are, we will make mistakes. Again, it is completely fine, it's part of the process, a process where we learn from those mistakes to continue to be the best at what we do.
Let's be honest, being part of an open-source community is not always easy: it comes with a whole new territory. It means that you are becoming vulnerable: us as a company, but each individual working at Meilisearch. Vulnerable to said mistakes. Vulnerable to others’ judgment. Vulnerable to people's comments, which, unfortunately, aren't always friendly. Those are things we can learn as a community and as a company.
Going the public way, working all together with the open source community also means that as a company, we cannot iterate as fast as we would like. We understand that it's a necessary step that will pay off in the medium to long term, even in this competitive world. In any cases, we strive for quality and not quantity.
To distribute our code, manage versions and contributions, we are using git as our source code management tool and GitHub as the source of truth for all our repositories including the search engine itself, our multiple integrations, Meilisearch demos and some other tools we made available to our community.