At RedButton, both using and contributing to open source software is a fundamental part of our core value system. The Open Source Initiative defines open source as “a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in”. The above read in combination with RedButton's mission statement makes it clear that the use of and contribution to open source is a fundamental part of the how we intend to and do deliver on innovation, quality and service level goals.

In general terms however, company mission statements and values can easily be ideals that are at such a high level that they remain distinctly unmeasurable. In our case, we found ourselves in a position to look back at the last few years and in particular at the community contributions we have made, and also measure our commitment to some of our core mission statements and values. 

It is important to note, that when we say community contributions, we mean contributions with no strings attached, in other words one does not have to make use of RedButton's services or have any association with RedButton to benefit from the contributions.  

At RedButton we have exemplified our commitment to open source, and thereby making a lasting contribution to the community, with source code level contributions, debugging, forum and mailing list contributions as well as recently funding feature development of a core component of our network software, Coova Chilli, which you can freely download and use thanks to its GPL license. David Bird, CTO of Coova Technologies, says, "Coova is happy to have RedButton as part of our open-source community and we thank them for their contributions; helping to make CoovaChilli into the leading commercial grade open-source captive portal access controller."

In so doing we have certainly put our money where our collective mouths are. These are tangible contributions, and while our needs where certainly the prime motivator, the fact remains that there are no strings attached to our contributions and even our closest competitors stand to profit from our work, but that is ok, we'll continue our efforts and its a large part of our core values, in short it makes us happy, and so thats why we do it. 

It is also worth noting that in 2009, we supervised a Computer Science Honours project in the UCT Computer Science department, co-supervised by RedButton director Nico de Wet and Dr. Antoine Begula, entitled "A Highly Scalable Monitoring System For A Network Of Wi-Fi Hotspots" (click here for the project website). This further exemplifies our commitment to what we believe in.