My personal philosophy on software is that the more people using it and the more developer eyes on a piece of code, the wider the net cast and the more transparent the project. This is better for everyone in the longer term. New solutions can be found, feedback can be built back into the software more quickly and we can respond easily to our customers’ requests.
We evolve when we use open-source tools, and if we were built on a proprietary platform, I think 99designs would have been a very different story. As a result of our decision to go with open source, we’ve now got offices in both Melbourne and San Francisco, over 70 staff, tens of millions of visitors to our website every month, and by any measure we’ve been successful. This week we launched into Latin America.