We are now two weeks into our new open source grit endeavour.

So, what happened after the big launch day? 

When you spend a lot of time preparing for launching or, in this case, opening, it's always a bit scary. And one is naturally excited to see what will happen. If anything. That would be the worst. You do a big launch and then - silence. Luckily, that was not the case with our opening of the code base to our grit platform, which is now available to download at GitHub.

The summary

Since 5th May, we have seen forks of the code, several clones, stars of the repo, many likes with "kudos" on our LinkedIn posts, and feedback from people who actually tried to download, deploy, load compounds and assay data, and concluded that it was easy. That's a good start and feels really good.

On top of that, there is also some movement on the more business side of things. Talks with companies that will try or test on their own, partnerships with companies with complementary tools, and a new consultancy project with some advanced chemically aware software.

The roadmap dilemma

What's coming next? As a starting point, we don't want to display a public roadmap on GitHub as that is looking into a future we do not know, and hence, a risk of people taking it for a fact and getting disappointed.

But we do want people to see the existing issues, so we don't get the same issue multiple times. And what we are actively working on so that people can see that something new, that they may be missing, is in fact on its way. I spoke to someone last week who said it would be lovely to have an SAR feature on top of the current upload and storage functionality. In that situation, it was good to be able to say: We have that from the closed platform and will port it over soon".

It would naturally be sad for everybody if people take a look at the platform and conclude that "they do not support xyz, so it's probably not for me" if what they are missing is, in fact, next on our internal to-do list. But it's still early days, and we need to decide the right balance for us in this case.

And as the code is now open source, anyone missing a feature or a tool or thinks the documentation lacks something can just clone, fix, and send us a pull request. We still haven't tried that yet. That will be the next big joy as an open source platform maintainer.