Repository navigation
Guide for Companies to Onboard the FinTorch Project
In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the intersection between the open-source/academic world and the business sector presents a unique opportunity for innovation and growth. The open-source community thrives on collaboration, transparency, and the free exchange of ideas, principles that fuel groundbreaking advancements and technological democratization. Conversely, the business world operates on models that often necessitate a degree of confidentiality to safeguard intellectual property and maintain competitive advantages, thereby generating revenue and driving economic growth.
Our goal is to forge a synergy between these two realms, leveraging the strengths of each to address complex challenges and foster innovation. To achieve this, we propose a dual-repository approach: an open-source repository licensed under the MIT License, complemented by a closed-source counterpart hosted within a company's private repository. This strategy allows for the seamless integration of contributions from the open-source community into the company's projects, enriching them with diverse insights and enhancements. The following diagram shows the FinTorch repository in the center and the various research topics and companies as nodes.
Contributions made to the open-source repository by the research topics can be synchronized with the company's private copy, ensuring that the collaborative efforts of the open-source community are reflected in the company's projects. However, modifications and developments made within the company's private repository do not require sharing back with the open-source repository. This delineation ensures that businesses can protect their proprietary advancements while benefiting from and contributing to the open-source ecosystem.
This approach creates an optimal balance, enabling companies to collaborate on public projects and contribute to the collective knowledge base while maintaining the autonomy to develop and monetize proprietary technologies. By adopting this model, we can collaboratively tackle challenging problems, accelerate innovation, and ensure that the benefits of technological advancements are widely accessible, all while respecting and protecting each participant's unique operational needs and contributions.
We aim to bridge the gap between the open-source/academic world and the business sector, creating a vibrant ecosystem where shared knowledge and proprietary innovation coexist harmoniously. This guide aims to empower companies to seamlessly onboard themselves into open-source projects, contributing to a future where technology is developed openly, ethically, and sustainably, benefiting all stakeholders involved.
For the technical guide on how to set this up see Technical Guide to Clone a Public Repository into a Private Repository for FinTorch.