Philosophy

Be more human

On the back of our business cards is our mantra: "Be more human."

As web professionals, we interact with computing devices for many hours each day. How do we ensure that the choices we make, for ourselves and for our clients, are focused on the things that really matter?

"Be more human" is a reminder to us that we are in business to solve human communication problems, and that technology is simply a means to that end. "Be more human" sets the tone for how we deal with each other as employees, with our clients, and the users of the software that we create.

Open source

We are strong advocates of open source software. We believe in - and have experienced firsthand - the power of an open developer community. The best way to encourage and create better software is to have people contribute back to the main code base and share their work with others.

In November 2006 we released the SilverStripe CMS and Sapphire application framework as a free, open source download. (We chose to release under the BSD license because we consider it the most business-friendly and developer-friendly license.)

Open-sourcing our software has been a far bigger success for our company than we could have imagined. The global interest in SilverStripe Ltd. the company and SilverStripe the product has been astounding. We have seen strong growth in adoption of our software — from the members of our SilverStripe Partner Program to a large number of web developers around the globe. In addition, many of our larger customers are now developing unique and novel solutions on top of SilverStripe and are integrating our software deep into their own product offerings.

As the technology industry evolves and open source is increasingly becoming the default option for businesses, organisations and government, SilverStripe will remain at the centre of this evolution and help push awareness and adoption not only for open source, but related concepts such as open data.