Unfault is only partially Open-Sourced. Its clients, CLI are Visual Studio Code extensions released under a permissive MIT license. Its API is propriatery.

My journey with Open Source

Open-source is the framework that has allowed me to live my passion for coding for the past 30 years. I was then only a teenager but I was able to install my first Linux distribution back in the mid-90s for free. Without this model, I would not have been able to enjoy myself all these years.

I started with simple projects like contributing translations to documentation before graduating to IRC clients. If your Disney movies aren’t Taram or the Lion King, you might not be aware what IRC, it was basically Discord but with less emojis.

This is when my love for Python started and I continued with various projects over the years.

Back in 2017, I started working on the Chaos Toolkit, a Chaos Engineering tool for engineers. It was the peak of “everything-as-code” and that’s how it was designed. To this day, many teams enjoy its capabilities.

Recently I created the fault as a fault injector writtent in rust. You should check it out, it’s a fun tool but really capable to validate your capacity to sustain errors from network hiccups or ask your LLM to change its behavior.

Anyway, Open Source is not a side project, it’s my driver.

Why not open-sourcing everything at Unfault then?

Open source has a governance and sustainability challenge. Nothing new, it’s always been the issue. If you don’t monetize your work, how do you pay the bills?

When I started thinking about unfault, I immediately chose to make it a paid business model because I want the project to have a long life and be in a position to provide the right value they want from it.

I still made the call to open source everything that I could, even some bits that some folks might consider IP-worthy. At the end of the day, I would say a good chunk of the entire project is actually open-source.

I don’t have a clear solution for the larger open source ecosystem. I’m running an experiment here: can I sustain myself in a way that allows me to keep working on great tools and offer most of it back under an open license? This is the hypthesis that I’m running and we’ll see if it pans out.