Open Sourcing Aragon

Making Aragon Code Accessible and Providing Documentation Soon

When I was 12, I got my first laptop — a piece of junk with only 256MB of RAM. It was slow and literally falling apart. But this didn't stop me from developing. Using Linux, I had the latest available software. And thanks to thousands of developers around the world, I could examine different pieces of code and learn programming.

The free software and open source phenomena has not only made the world a more inclusive place, but it has also increased the speed of software development — by sharing, developers no longer need to reinvent the wheel. For example, we didn't have to build the native app wrapper or the Ethereum wallet for Aragon.

So when we find something that we can give back to the community, we make a point of doing so. We've found that by sharing code, others can learn from it (like I did as a teenager) and people will find ways to improve it.

Sharing code is even more important for running decentralized organizations, where security and transparency are critical. With money at stake, users need access to the code to know it's behaving as intended. Because signing a bad transaction could result in significant financial loss.

For these reasons, we are fully open sourcing Aragon today, both the contracts and the dapp.

Note that it's still a very early release and Aragon contracts are currently being refactored to achieve the architecture outlined above. In addition, there will be a massive front-end refactor this summer.

In the coming weeks, we'll create contribution guides and begin documenting the entire code base. As one of the most complex dApps, we have a lot of work ahead to make the code base understandable.

As stated in our development plan, we will also work on a module system so anyone can build on top of Aragon. By open sourcing Aragon, we hope to open opportunities to improve and extend the functionalities of Aragon — without having to reinvent the wheel.

Thanks,

The Aragon Team