Opening Clock

Clock have decided to embrace the open source world and release everything we can for all to use. We will open all our policies, development methodologies, software tools, and any assets we produce internally. As much as possible we are going to put it out there for others to use, comment, and criticize.

We are a digital design, build and hosting company with strong technology, visual, UX , and software design skills. Clock started in 1997 and has grown from a small design agency to one of the top 100 web agency in the country. Over the years we have used a lot of open source technology but always retained the IP (intellectual property) over the software and services we have built. At times the battle for IP has been the hardest part of  the contract negotiation with our clients. A few years ago I was talking to our CEO, Syd Nadim, about a deal that had stalled  because we couldn't come to an agreement on the IP of the Clock software framework (Atrox). I suggested to him that rather than repeatably going through this pain in the desperate hope that we would make more money controlling the IP, why didn't we just make it free for all to use. Clients have always paid for our skills and our ability to solve their problems. Giving them our frameworks and toolkits wasn't going to stop us selling the our expertise, at worst they would build new web sties on top of our framework without us. After some debate we agreed it would be better they did that and possibly ask us for support in the future rather than dumping our technology and going with another supplier. From then onwards we offered our software under the BSD License which basically gives anyone the rights to do what they like with our code as long as they retain the license and credit us as the authors. This has been working well and the company continued to grow without a dent on revenue from the loss of IP. We now want to take the next step in the open world and actually make everything available and maybe even build a community around some of the tools or services we have produced over the years.

Over the next couple of months myself and others at Clock will be making public our polices, methods and software via this blog. All of this would have previously been for internal eyes only, but I'm hoping that some of it will be of interest to people or and maybe some will contribute feedback and suggestions on how we can make things better.