Do you thing the tech landscape today would have allowed for nebula to be born? Lots of companies now have strict IP agreements they have team members sign.
That's a great question! One of the things I enjoyed during my time at Slack was their willingness to contribute to open source projects. We had similar IP clauses, but asking permission to open source things was straightforward.
The most important concern (IMO), was considering whether we could commit to properly maintaining a project. Before open sourcing anything, you need to discuss how you'll go about managing an issue and pull request backlog, so that people don't come across "dead" projects under your stewardship.
In a high growth startup, I do think something like this could happen again, but as a company grows, there are certainly more layers that can make it difficult to share things openly.
Seeing as Slack was born as a tool inside Glitch which existed only because of a side project called Flickr…
I don’t really think it’s the size or layers of a company that prevent; it’s the culture. This culture of creation permeates everything I’ve seen Stewart Butterfield do. At least from the outside. Admirable and extremely profitable.
Just wanted to chime in along the others that I also love Nebula, and I'm really grateful to have a mesh option that is modern, truly decentralized and self hostable. Nebula is also just an plain elegant IMO, one of those pieces of software that clicks right away top to bottom. Now I just hope it gains momentum to make it into a wider variety of tools so it becomes ever more accessible. So again, thank you and everyone else who had a hand in it!
Do you thing the tech landscape today would have allowed for nebula to be born? Lots of companies now have strict IP agreements they have team members sign.