Macro is not open source because I like Richard Stallman. I don’t personally use Linux. I have an iPhone and I prefer when people text me with blue bubbles, though of course I think this is a bit of an anti-competitive practice. My point is I am not an open source maximalist. Nor am I a free software evangelist.
Macro is open source because if I was not the founder of Macro, but rather an arms-length user of Macro, I would want it to be open source. I apply this logic to not only the license but all features; and I consider the license to be an important feature of the product.
Macro is open source because we need people to trust us. Open source is a boon for general trust because (i) you can self-host, which we don’t really recommend except for certain military and healthcare use cases (ii) if you choose not to self-host you at least know you can move your data at any point in time to a self-hosted version (iii) you can have more trust your data is secure and (iv) you know that the operation of your workspace is not contingent on our continued solvency — in a prior business when I was making closed source software one thing that enterprise buyers asked for was a “source code” provision that we give them our code in case of insolvency. In our current business we never need to make that specific promise because it is true by default.
Macro is not open source because we want people to self-host. We are okay with companies self-hosting, and this is built into our commercial model. Companies do not need to pay us if they self-host, but since many large enterprises have qualms with running AGPL software, we expect many will want a commercial + support license from us. But we don’t really want this. It’s more support work and it fragments the ecosystem (e.g. the ability to collaborate across companies).
Macro is not open source because we expect contributions outside the core team. We welcome external contributions but thus far they’ve been mediocre and somewhat of a distraction (though of course, we are very thankful for contributor’s time and/or inference spend).
Macro is open source despite most open source projects having poor design. Product design is central to Macro. In my opinion, Apple (circa 2010s, at least) is the pinnacle of product design. And Apple is very closed source. One of the main pushbacks against going open source I got from our team was that open source application software (e.g. LibreOffice) is generally not well-designed. Why? I think this is due to (i) the characteristics of the people that build open source, i.e. engineers not designers, and (ii) the decentralized nature of open source projects makes it hard to do good design. (Good design requires consistency and taste and quality control, all of which require centralization and power vested in a small number of individuals to hold a high bar.)
Macro is open source despite limited early support from our team. When I tell people Macro is open source they are surprised to learn this was because I pushed for this strongly, against the advice of some of our engineers, and without the resounding support of our company.
It was my strongly held conviction for a while before actually pulling the trigger that we should be open source. I am happy about it, but it is also an inevitability. Open source business software makes too much sense. This is the way the world will work whether we do it or not. So we ought to do it, and lead, or someone else will.
Macro is open source because we want it to be as extensible and modular as possible. It’s possible to have a great plugin system without being open source, like Figma or Minecraft. But it’s easier to build on top of something that’s fully open.
We’re not sure exactly what’s going to be built on top of Macro, but we’re confident “the operating system for your company,” which Macro promises to be, needs to be as customizable as possible. And not just in the way things like Slack or Notion are customizable; much more than that. The workspace itself should be programmable.
Macro is open source for the aura, vibes, and moral high ground. Everybody loves open source software. People who don’t understand software can be quickly educated and become supportive of open source. But the main reason is to appeal to techies — engineers and executives/founders who might be trained in technical fields — who are excited about an open source system they can build on top of. The second order effects of this point probably go underweighted, even when taking into account that they are underweighted. It really is perception-shifting to be open source.
Macro is open source because the best people want to work on open source. That’s not to say the best people don’t mostly work on closed source; they do. But that’s just because the majority of exciting opportunities are in closed source. All else equal, talented people will choose to work on open source.
Open source is good positioning against the status quo. Marc Benioff in his book “Behind the Cloud” says to always position against the market leader (in his case Siebel, in our case Microsoft and Google) and if there is no market leader then position against the status quo (in our case, the hodgepodge of proprietary software that companies “run” on today).
Macro is fully open source, not “open core” nor “source available”. Open core means that only a subset of the code is open source. Companies use it to be partially open while preserving a closed commercial offering. It’s a reasonable thing to do and we considered it, but I didn’t feel it was necessary in our case unlike purely backend self-hosted software. And since it wasn’t needed there was no reason to do it: it’s best to be maximally open. By the same logic, we are now fully open source, not source-available — where the code is public but the license restricts self-hosting or redistribution or some other restriction preventing the project from meeting OSI’s definition of open source. When we first made the repo available in 2025 we started with source available, but this was always a short term strategy as we figured out how to be even more open (or rather, grew the balls necessary to make the commit, and make all our IP open source.)
For now, Macro is AGPLv3. This is a good license for us for a few reasons, but mostly, it provides some protection against large companies and hyperscalers using Macro without contributing back to the ecosystem. If they wanted to offer hosted versions of Macro, or to self-host it for internal enterprise use, then they’d also have to make their customizations and plugins open source. We’d be fine with that. But because in most cases this is hard to do, we expect large self-hosters to pay for an alternative commercial partnership, and contribute back to the ecosystem through a combination of money, engineering contributions, inference compute and/or other types of support.
Check out our repo and consider contributing at github.com/macro-inc/macro.