Early in 2025, the Harper team agreed that after nearly a decade of closed source development, we wanted to open source our core product. The challenge: how do we achieve this without disrupting feature development, customer trust, and our overall business success? In this talk, I will share Harper’s intimate story of open sourcing our core product while maintaining engineering excellence.

The initial lift brought challenges like splitting the main repository into multiple open, closed, and source-available distributions, deciding what technical debt to bring forward, and restructuring our build and testing systems. Today, we’re navigating the active development of the new distributions, while maintaining enterprise support; including licensing decisions, architecture composability, repository synchronization, and community development.

Open source ecosystems thrive when production systems can be sustainably maintained, not just published and abandoned. This talk is for engineers, technical leaders, and developer relations teams who want a realistic view of open sourcing production systems without sacrificing business viability or engineering quality.

Open source ecosystems are healthier when organizations sustainably contribute, not just publish code. Yet many efforts describe the end result without explaining how they got there, leaving teams uncertain about making the journey themselves.
This session shares Harper's complete open source story with concrete examples: business decisions that made it viable, technical challenges we faced during transition, and ongoing work maintaining both open source momentum and commercial success. By being transparent about both what worked and what we're navigating (monetization boundaries, licensing decisions, repository synchronization, and community development) this talk helps other teams avoid common traps like unclear commercialization plans, unsustainable technical debt, and trust gaps from ambiguous licensing.
Whether you're a founder evaluating feasibility, an engineering leader planning technical work, or developer relations building community, this talk offers adaptable practices grounded in real decisions. The outcome: more organizations confident they can open source without sacrificing their business or engineering excellence, leading to more durable projects, better-resourced maintainers, and stronger open source ecosystems.