Why we started Experimental Open Works
A lot of the infrastructure people rely on every day used to be open, or cheap, or simply assumed. Over time, piece by piece, much of it has been fenced off. A format becomes a subscription. A standard becomes a certification you have to pay for. A capability that shipped for free becomes a line item.
None of this happens all at once, and rarely with bad intent. It just accretes. And the people who feel it least are the ones who could most afford to fix it.
The pattern we keep seeing
- Something genuinely useful gets built.
- It becomes standard enough that people depend on it.
- A gate goes up around the part that makes it useful.
- Everyone downstream pays, forever.
We don't think every gate is wrong. But a lot of them sit on top of things that work better as shared, open infrastructure — and when that's true, someone should just build the free version and give it away.
So that's what this is
Experimental Open Works is a foundation for exactly that. We pick tools, services, and infrastructure that have been gated behind cost or control, and we build an open alternative in their place. Free to use, free to inspect, free to keep.
We measure ourselves one way: how much useful software we can put into the commons, and keep there.
Our first project, Let's Seal, is coming shortly. More will follow.