Why Not Open Source?

It’s a fair question—and one we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.

Short answer: we might someday—but not right now.

The reason is simple: we care more about getting the experience right than getting the license right.

We’re not anti–open source. A lot of the software we use and respect is open source. Projects like that are a big part of why this whole space even exists.

But open source isn’t the goal by itself. It’s a means to an end.

The end, at least for us, is pretty simple: a media server that actually works the way people expect it to. Playback starts instantly. It doesn’t randomly fail on certain devices. You don’t have to think about codecs, containers, or why something works in one app but not another. You can share it with someone who isn’t technical and not immediately regret that decision.

If you’ve spent time with tools in this space, you’ve probably felt the tradeoff. There are options that are polished and easy to use, but come with baggage—accounts, paywalls, product decisions you didn’t ask for. And there are options that are flexible and open, but require a certain level of patience and tolerance for rough edges.

A lot of people end up running both.

That gap is what we’re trying to close.

Staying focused

Right now, we’re focused on getting a few things really right. Playback reliability. Consistency across devices. A setup that doesn’t require constant tweaking or troubleshooting. Those things sound simple, but they’re not, especially once you try to support a wide range of formats, devices, and network conditions.

Keeping the core of Dubby closed-source, at least for now, helps us stay focused on that. It lets us move quickly, make changes without coordinating across a bunch of forks, and keep the experience cohesive while it’s still taking shape.

That tradeoff won’t make sense to everyone, and that’s okay.

What people are really asking

What we’ve found, though, is that when people ask “why not open source?”, they’re usually not actually asking about the license.

They’re asking something else.

They’re asking if this is going to turn into something they regret depending on. If basic functionality is going to get paywalled later. If they’re going to lose control over their own setup. If they’re signing up for something that slowly drifts away from what made it appealing in the first place.

Those concerns are completely valid. We’ve felt them ourselves.

So rather than answering that question with a license, we try to answer it with how we build the product.

Dubby is designed to work locally. You don’t need a cloud account just to access your own server. You’ll always be able to play your own media without hitting a paywall. The core experience—what most people think of as “the product”—isn’t something we’re interested in putting behind a subscription.

If we ever cross that line, we’ve missed the point.

Transparency and security

We also take transparency and security seriously, even without being open source.

We don’t believe “just trust us” is a sufficient answer. Instead, we focus on building systems that are predictable and easy to reason about. Dubby is local-first by design, which means your media stays on your machine and playback doesn’t depend on our servers. There’s no requirement to route your traffic through us, and no hidden dependency on a cloud service just to use your own setup.

Over time, we plan to be increasingly explicit about how things work under the hood—what talks to what, what data (if any) leaves your machine, and why. Where it makes sense, we’ll open up parts of the system, document them clearly, or make them verifiable in other ways.

Sustainability

At the same time, this is a real product, and it has to be sustainable.

There’s a lot of ongoing work involved in keeping something like this running well—especially if the goal is to make it feel as seamless as the best consumer apps. Our approach is to charge for convenience and optional capabilities, not for control over your own media. Things like remote connectivity, advanced features, or services that cost us real infrastructure to provide.

That line is important to us, and we’re trying to be explicit about it early.

Could that change?

As for open source—could that change in the future? Yeah, it could.

We’re not philosophically opposed to open sourcing parts of Dubby, or even moving toward an open core model over time. But that’s something we’d want to do intentionally, once the foundation is solid.

It’s relatively easy to open something up later. It’s much harder to go the other direction without breaking trust, and that’s not something we’re willing to do.

So if we ever make that shift, it’ll be because it makes the product better, not because it sounds good on a roadmap.

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At the end of the day, we didn’t start Dubby to make a statement about licensing.

We started it because this space still doesn’t quite have a solution that feels both good and respectful to the user at the same time.

That’s what we’re trying to build.

If we get that right, the rest tends to fall into place.