Three Reasons That We Make Canvas Open Source

"Early on, it was obvious that being open source provided some natural inoculation against being acquired by one of our competitors. It also presented customers with an escape hatch in case Instructure were to fail them. Thankfully, those concerns are less relevant now that Instructure has made it to IPO and Canvas has a proven track record in the market.

Instructure’s commercial success may prompt questions about whether and why Canvas is open source. Let’s start by acknowledging that classifications of “open source” versus “commercial open source” versus “open core” are sometimes hotly debated. I’m not overly sensitive about these labels; Instructure will continue to release new Canvas code to GitHub every few weeks no matter what...

Three Reasons That We Make Canvas Open Source

"Early on, it was obvious that being open source provided some natural inoculation against being acquired by one of our competitors. It also presented customers with an escape hatch in case Instructure were to fail them. Thankfully, those concerns are less relevant now that Instructure has made it to IPO and Canvas has a proven track record in the market.

Instructure’s commercial success may prompt questions about whether and why Canvas is open source. Let’s start by acknowledging that classifications of “open source” versus “commercial open source” versus “open core” are sometimes hotly debated. I’m not overly sensitive about these labels; Instructure will continue to release new Canvas code to GitHub every few weeks no matter what people want to call it...