2023-03-13 · Facebook (in Russian)

Why Doma.ai is built on open source

Why is Doma.ai built on open source? In 2017, when I was working half-time at PIK, two weeks a month, we lived in a cozy old five-story building, in one apartment with people from Yekaterinburg: Dmitry Chirkov, who later became IT director of PIK-Comfort, Vitaly Popov, who created PIK-Remont, Pavel White, Longer and a couple of other guys.

At the same time I was thinking about what had grown from an IT system for one particular management company into Doma, a platform for many. Back then, in the kitchen of that Soviet five-story building, we discussed making the system open source. Usually everyone hoards their product like Gollum over the ring. "My precious" and all that. Not ready for integrations, for partnerships.

We decided to go the open-source way. At the time it wasn't clear why. Now it has become clearer

I want to create a technological standard for an IT platform in housing services that anyone in the world can use. Then our product will grow not only the clients of a particular system in Russia but management companies all over the world. If independent teams around the world start using our open code as the base for their development, and a community besides us appears that is interested in developing this code, it will benefit all products built on our open source.

The advantages:

  1. A community of IT people forms, and they all live somewhere, one way or another. Housing services are a conservative, underdeveloped sector not only in Russia. These developers around the world feel the pain of living in an apartment building and want to cure it. This community of IT people can join in improving the code and influence its quality and the new functionality that appears in it. Teams from different countries can work on it together.

  2. Code quality. When you create open source, you can't write badly. Because other people on another continent will use this code. If it is badly written, obviously the whole thing won't fly.

  3. Freedom for clients. When we tell a developer or a management company that has its own specific requirements that they can take our code and add what they need, they feel less dependent. We tell the client: if our development strategy differs from what they need, they can take the code and add anything they like to it. Not depend on our strategy, but improve the code themselves.

It seems this product approach is the future. I want to be part of it

Translated from Russian. First published on Facebook on March 13, 2023.