15 Years of Free Software Projects: A Review

Sign in<br>Subscribe

Fifteen years ago, I wrote an article summing up my first year as a free software developer. I then wrote regular reviews over the nine years that followed. I covered all sorts of topics: the first steps, contributing, failures, and so on. I finally wrapped up those ten years reflecting on the satisfaction I had drawn from all these accomplishments. I thought I had covered everything, but after five more years, I felt I still had things to share.<br>Over this period, my contributions have been made exclusively to my project Kitsu (AGPL license), backed by my company CGWire. Kitsu is a project management software for animation and VFX studios, built on JavaScript (Vue.js), Python (Flask), and Postgres. It's an important building block of their information systems. Around this software, we provide hosting and support services, which have allowed me to make a full-time living from it for nearly 10 years now.<br>For this review, after a recap of where Kitsu stands, I'll cover several themes: collaborating with a hugely successful project, being a parent and a developer, organizing our first event dedicated to our solution, finding a viable business model, doing free software in the age of generative AI, and finally I'll step outside the Kitsu scope with some thoughts on personal data and LLMs.<br>Previous reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9<br>The state of the project<br>Today, Kitsu is recognized as a solid solution across the entire animation sector. We equip around 500 studios with 1 to 1,000 people (most between 20 and 50 people) in more than 30 countries worldwide.<br>The films and series using Kitsu are mainly independent productions. Many of them have received prestigious awards, with recurring successes at the Annecy Festival (the reference in 2D animation), but also at Cannes, the Césars, and the Oscars. The most awarded of them is Flow (a 3D film, as it happens!).<br>It's a rather gratifying result. That said, we've never broken out of that indie sphere; the big studios have always snubbed our solution, preferring the American standard run by Autodesk. As a result, our financial performance has remained very modest compared to typical startups (€500k/year in revenue). This should be put in perspective, though: the sector has been going through a severe crisis since 2023, and surviving it is already an achievement in itself.<br>On the team side, there are 5 of us working on it full-time, and we benefit from regular contributions from our community (tickets, PRs, plugins, and recently a mobile app). So there's sustained activity around the product.<br>As for the license, Kitsu is still under AGPL. Its installation and use are fully documented, but it still depends heavily on the commercial structure behind it (CGWire). Several community members have a good understanding of how it works, but not enough to maintain it themselves.<br>In short, the project is moving forward slowly but surely and doing well. The tool fulfills its role, and the community is happy and growing. We've been able to keep the license active all along, and adoption continues to increase.<br>The encounter with Blender<br>Through my previous project, the late Cozy Cloud, and more recently the OSS Founders events, I had already had the chance to meet the founders of popular free software projects. Among them were the CEOs of Matomo, Nextcloud, and Strapi. These exchanges are always exhilarating, interesting, and informative, but they never go further than a few good conversations and handshakes.<br>With Kitsu, for the first time, I had the opportunity to collaborate directly with a successful free software project, and no small one at that: Blender (a booming 3D creation tool). Not only did I get a front-row seat to their recent rise, but I also took part in it a little.<br>Indeed, most studios using Blender turned naturally to our solution to manage their projects. The foundation was maintaining a similar management tool (Attract), but its lead developer was none other than Francesco Siddi (now CEO). His growing involvement across every area of the foundation left him little time to work on it. Seeing Kitsu's progress, he simply figured it was easier to support us than to keep maintaining his own project.<br>And so Kitsu was chosen to track the Blender Studio's video projects, and was also championed by them. We thus gained recognition and benefited from international visibility. The studio didn't stop there: it also supported us financially a little by commissioning a few features in the software. In return, our software proved quite useful to them for getting organized and easing the creation of their films. Let me take this opportunity to thank them once again for their help!<br>Another important element, which had a big impact on us, was the presentation of the Blender project that Ton Roosendaal gave me during my visit to the studio (he was still CEO at the time, but less involved as he had started treatment for...