There are two distinct things that I’ve learned in the 25 years that I’ve been around the manufacturing software industry. First, that dominating the market means that you must be beholden to the almighty dollar and not actually care if your customer base becomes more efficient or profitable, and second is that, in the simplest possible terms, greed pays, and it pays big.
Almost five years ago, Libre Technologies set out to become the antithesis of those observations. We are absolutely, unabashed capitalists but that doesn’t mean that we need to embody the absolute lack of values displayed by the current players in this market. We operate on four core values. On the surface, they would appear to be common sense, but a bit of observation will tell you that the people that currently dominate the market are completely devoid of any of all of them.
Be Generous
What this means to us is that you get as good as you give. It’s why our Core products don’t have license fees. It’s why we use platforms like Discord and Discourse to grow a community that can help to support the install base as it grows. It’s why we want the system integrators that use our products to provide low cost pilots to their customers. We will get paid for our value; but only after our customer base starts to see real gains in productivity and can iteratively justify the costs.
Be Fearless and Decisive
The world moves at a speed where information could change multiple times during a decision cycle. Having the confidence to make decisions on architecture, price, go to market strategy, etc. knowing that the landscape will change and that we will need to adapt to it, is part of our DNA. The fact that there is currently a 30-year-old legacy code base that is dragging down manufacturing is a testament to the collective industry’s inability to operate on this principle.
Be Curious and Objective
We truly hope to never hear one of our employees utter the words – “We’ve always done it that way.” The very fact that parts of the Libre stack didn’t even exist three years ago means that we must always be curious about what is changing in our world and have a plan to adapt to those new and improved ways of doing things. But we must also be objective in how we assess new things. What we adopt into the Libre platform must, first and foremost, serve the needs of the install base. Curiosity drives excitement about new tech; objectivity prevents us from making rash decisions about adoption.
Be Collaborative
“If you want go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
Words to live by for an open source provider. There are a million people out there that are smarter than us, that have more experience than us that see things that we don’t see. We need to be sure that there is always a place for their collective input. That doesn’t mean that every contribution will be merged into Libre but it means that the contribution will always be welcome. We’re trying to Revolutionize Manufacturing. In 10 years’ time, We want Libre to be viewed as having had the same net positive impact on manufacturing as the PLC. That is a massively transformative purpose and it can only be achieved through collaboration.
Do you agree? If this sounds to you like a better way forward, join us on our Discord server, our Discourse FAQ page or pull the platform from Github.