Powerweave and open-source software
Open-source software is weird.
Countless highly-skilled software developers collaborate to make software freely-available to everyone. Open-source software powers your bank, your car, even space-faring robots.
Well, turns out it also powers Powerweave!
Regular, closed-source software is as you would expect: you are not meant to peek inside, you have no rights to modify it, and redistribution is strictly prohibited.
Closed-source software makes capitalist sense: people who invested time and money into developing software are expecting to generate income from this work.
Open-source software, on the other hand, is software that is licensed in such a way that users are allowed to view the source, change the software, and distribute the changes — for free, or not!
The magic of open-source software is manifested in the quality of projects that receive tons of attention from some of the world’s top minds. This allows even small start-ups to quickly grow and create value for society.
Powerweave, like most companies, benefits greatly from open-source software. The most prominent work on which Powerweave builds include:
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler and its runtime system;
The Postgresql database;
Building on open-source software allows Powerweave to focus on our expertise and deliver value. Powerweave exists to accelerate the clean energy transition, not to re-invent foundational software such as databases and compilers.
We are deeply grateful for all of the foundational work on which we depend. That’s why, unlike most companies, Powerweave gives back to the community by contributing to open-source software. Our engineering team is involved in the maintenance and development of many projects, including:
Cloud Haskell, a framework to express and run distributed systems;
beam, a framework for pure and type-safe SQL manipulations;
dimensional, a library to express type-safe calculations involving physical dimensions;
javelin, a library implementing data structures for high-performance data science.
We will get involved further in the community as Powerweave scales to ensure that we take only as much as we give back.
To stay up-to-date with Powerweave’s open-source efforts, make sure to keep an eye on our GitHub profile.