In my last article, I explained why we’re opening the gates to Jadaptive’s software and inviting people to come and use it.
There’s an obvious question I deliberately didn’t answer.
If we’re opening the gates, why not open the source too?
Because opening the field and giving away the field aren’t the same thing.
I should probably explain why I’ve made that distinction, because I’ve spent a significant part of the last 25 years building open-source software.
I’ve also spent a significant part of those 25 years commercialising it.
I’ve got both T-shirts.
I’ve been here before
More than 20 years ago, I created J2SSH.
It was open source.
People used it. A community formed around it. It grew.
Eventually Lee had to eat.
J2SSH became J2SSH Maverick, a commercial SSH API.
The commercial product moved forward.
The original open-source project was left to rust in the rain.
Then came SSL-Explorer.
That was open source too, but this time we deliberately built a business around commercial open source.
There was an open-source product and an enterprise offering around it.
And it worked.
In many ways, SSL-Explorer is probably the closest I’ve previously come to what we’re now doing with the Field of Users.
But that was more than 20 years ago.
Open source in 2026 isn’t the same thing as open source in 2003.
Everyone owns the T-shirt
Back then, when you built it, they really did come.
Communities formed around projects whether there was a company standing behind them or not.
People contributed. People built things. People became invested in the project itself.
That still happens.
Some of the most successful open-source projects I see today fall broadly into two groups.
There are small, focused projects solving a specific problem, often without a commercial organisation trying to monetise the people using them.
And there are enormous projects with genuinely broad communities and large numbers of contributors, where the community really is part of the project.
What I’m much less convinced about today is the bit in the middle.
Commercial open source.
We’ve all seen the story.
A company releases something as open source.
People adopt it.
The download numbers go up.
Issues get filed.
A community apparently forms around it.
Investment arrives.
The company grows.
Then eventually somebody starts asking how all those users are going to turn into revenue.
Licences change.
Features move.
The free version gets restricted.
The company gets acquired.
Or the project simply stops receiving the attention it once did because the commercial priorities have moved elsewhere.
People have seen this movie before.
Everyone owns the T-shirt.
I don’t think people trust commercial open source in quite the same way anymore.
They’ll use it.
They’ll download it.
They’ll file issues.
But look at the contributors.
A collection of users downloading something from GitHub isn’t necessarily a community maintaining it.
And putting source code on GitHub doesn’t magically make commercial incentives disappear.
So let’s be honest about what we’re building
Jadaptive is a commercial company.
We need to make money.
There will be things we charge for.
We own the software.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that.
The Field of Users Strategy isn’t an attempt to dress proprietary software up as open source.
It’s something different.
Open source is a development and ownership model. Field of Users is a value model.
Our objective is to create a large community of people actually using our software.
We’re building a community of users, not necessarily a community of maintainers.
That’s an important distinction.
If you use one of our products and find a bug, you’ve contributed something.
If you tell us that it doesn’t work properly in your environment, you’ve contributed something.
If you request a feature because you’ve encountered a problem we hadn’t considered, you’ve contributed something.
If you deploy it successfully to 500 users and tell us about the experience, you’ve contributed something enormously valuable.
You don’t have to submit a pull request.
You don’t have to understand the source code.
You don’t have to become an unpaid software developer.
You can just be a user.
That’s enough.
Ray still owns the field.
But everyone is welcome to play on it.
And yes, Ray still needs to make some money.
The floodlights still burn electricity.
But what if Jadaptive disappears?
There’s an obvious challenge to all of this.
Open source gives you something Field of Users doesn’t.
An escape hatch.
If the company behind an open-source product disappears, changes direction or does something you don’t like, you have the source.
You can fork it.
You can maintain it.
You can continue building it.
That’s a real advantage of open source, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But I do think it’s worth asking a slightly uncomfortable question.
Are you actually going to do that?
If Jadaptive disappeared tomorrow, would you really take the source code for Nodal VPN, fork it and become its maintainer?
Would you start fixing bugs?
Would you start building releases?
Would you keep dependencies updated?
Would you implement the next feature you needed?
Maybe you would.
Maybe somebody else would.
For some projects, that’s exactly what happens.
But I suspect most users would do something rather more pragmatic.
They’d find another VPN.
Because they wanted a VPN.
They didn’t want another software project to maintain.
That’s not an argument against open source.
There are projects where the ability to inspect, modify, redistribute and independently maintain the source is enormously important.
But I think we sometimes overstate the practical protection source availability provides to ordinary users.
Having an escape hatch and actually climbing through it are two different things.
What if Jadaptive gets sold?
There’s another version of the same question.
What happens if I sell Jadaptive?
I can’t honestly tell you that will never happen.
If somebody made the right offer, I’d be mad not to consider it.
I’ve sold a company before.
I’ve got that T-shirt too.
It was a great experience in many ways, and I have nothing but respect for the people involved.
But I also discovered something about myself.
I don’t particularly enjoy working for someone else.
Selling a company generally means spending the next couple of years building the things you created under somebody else’s guidance.
You lose some control.
My wife Kelly would probably tell you that’s the stubborn Taurean in me.
Either way, I’m not particularly interested in doing it again.
But never say never.
If it did happen, I’d be asking some serious questions.
Why does this company want to buy Jadaptive?
What do they think is valuable about it?
Do they align with the values we’re trying to build here?
And, importantly, what are they planning to do with the users?
I’d want to explore whether protections could be put into the legal framework of any deal to prevent an acquirer simply crippling the software people had come to depend upon.
I don’t know how far you can realistically make those protections survive every future eventuality.
So I’m not going to promise something I can’t guarantee.
There is risk.
But there’s risk in open source too.
Projects get abandoned.
Maintainers burn out.
Commercial priorities change.
Communities disappear.
Licences change.
A source repository existing somewhere doesn’t necessarily mean somebody will maintain it for you.
There is no model that removes all of that risk.
Optimise for the users
What I can tell you is what I’m optimising for today.
It’s not selling Jadaptive.
I’m fortunate enough to have 25 years of work behind me.
At this point I’m much more interested in solving problems than finding a way to maximise my own net worth at every possible angle.
That doesn’t mean Jadaptive shouldn’t become valuable.
Quite the opposite.
I hope it becomes extremely valuable.
But I want that value to come from the products we’ve built, the expertise behind them and, most importantly, the people choosing to use them.
Build value around the products, not around the cap table.
If thousands of engineers and organisations are successfully using Jadaptive software, that has value.
And if somebody ever wanted to acquire Jadaptive because they recognised the value in that user base, then hopefully their interests would already be aligned with ours.
The users are the valuable thing.
Crippling the products that attracted them would destroy some of the thing they just bought.
Does that eliminate the risk?
Of course not.
Companies are perfectly capable of making bad decisions.
But the Field of Users isn’t a promise that nothing will ever change.
It’s an attempt to make the users the thing worth protecting.
This isn’t an argument against open source
I’m not abandoning open source.
Far from it.
I’m building Vork as an open-source project because I want to build a genuine community around it.
I want people contributing.
I want people building things with it.
I want the project itself to become something larger than the company or individual that started it.
That’s a different objective.
And a different story for another day.
Open source absolutely has its place in infrastructure software.
So does commercial software.
So does expertise.
The mistake, I think, is assuming that making something free to use automatically means it ought to be open source.
It doesn’t.
For Jadaptive, I think the Field of Users is the fairest strategy for everyone involved.
Users get genuinely useful software without arbitrary restrictions designed simply to force them into becoming customers.
Jadaptive gets users, experience, feedback, bug reports, feature requests and a growing ecosystem around the things we build.
And when someone needs something that carries additional commercial value, we get an opportunity to make some money.
Ray still owns the field.
Everyone gets to play.
And if we do this properly, the relationship works for both of us.
The gates are open. The field isn’t for sale.