After mentioning a vague roadmap to open-sourcing the dev.to codebase, we've finally decided on a date for the launch: August 8 (8/8).

Eight is a very lucky number 🎱 🤗

The overall benefits of open source code are numerous and fairly well-known, so I don't think I need to get into that too much right now for this audience. As such, I'll just mention a few key items of note:

• The first release will consist of our code, not a framework for immediately building an instance of a platform like this. However, that is a perfectly valid use case in the future. If you are interested in contributing such that we can eventually help people stand up their own version of this platform for their own business or society, we'll definitely welcome that input. But don't try to do that on day one, it would be silly. I wrote a post a few months back about what this platform could be in this sense. Our core business will remain serving the developer community as best we can.

• We are a for-profit company. We're working our butts off to grow a big, profitable dev network. I mention this because open source is sometimes conflated with non-profit. The transparency that comes with open-sourcing should add accountability and will help ensure we remain aligned with the community and un-evil as we grow.

• The code will be released under the GNU General Public License. Similar platforms have released using this license and we believe our use cases and ideology fit the same model.

We still have lots to iron out before August 8. If you want early access right away to help us in the push, please fill out this form.

Thanks for being an awesome community! Happy to discuss and answer your questions in the comments.