Why is Camus developing Open Source?

When we started Camus, one of our goals was to contribute our software expertise to the most important problem of our lifetimes. We know that technology can be a powerful enabler for change, and we wanted to bring best practices from the software industry into the grid sector.

Over the past couple of decades we’ve seen a profound transformation in the software industry, as companies and individuals shift to open source development for core technologies. Open source solutions have replaced the majority of proprietary infrastructure technologies, from operating systems (with Linux and Android), to data storage (with MySQL, Redis and PostGres), to big data analytics. We’ve seen that the ability of an open source approach to bring the best minds in the industry together solves big problems much faster than any individual person or vendor ever could.

A great example of the power of open source in democratizing change is Hadoop – the open source infrastructure which brought large scale distributed data processing to the rest of the industry. At Camus we are fortunate to work with one of Hadoop’s creators, Doug Cutting, as an advisor. He helped develop a position statement which goes into more detail on our open source strategy, which you can read here:

Why Open Source?

Transforming our current grid from a one-way system with limited instrumentation, to a fully modernized dynamic management environment capable of taking advantage of distributed resources and storage to manage renewable energy is a big challenge. It will take more than one vendor – more than just us writing great software – to really move the needle on managing grids differently. At the same time, we know that it’s possible to build a great business around an open source model. So we’re looking to move beyond the existing vendor-proprietary approach to grid software development, to share what we know and open source what we build. We hope that this will contribute to the existing community of open development in the power systems space, and allow all of us to move faster by learning from each other.