ZeroTurnaround Reveals An Open Source Hardware Line

ZeroTurnaround announces its plan to open source the company.

(PRWEB) April 01, 2013

ZeroTurnaround today announced its plans to open source the company, starting with a new line of hardware products deemed “GRM2”. This marks a significant shift in business model for the Estonian software house, who has been developing JRebel, the popular development productivity tool, since 2007.

With a strong foothold in the commercial software sphere, CEO and Founder Jevgeni Kabanov felt as though it was time to give even more back to the community, prompting the decision to look forward to a future in open source.

"GRM2 (tm) is certainly a new venture for us", commented Kabanov, speaking from the site of the planned production facility in Estonia. "It fits well with our company mission of making the world a more efficient place. At this stage in the company development we do believe that ZeroTurnaround has enough resources to produce GRM2 (tm) without securing outside investment."

Due to the open source nature of the project, Kabanov says he expects the community to jump at the opportunity to support and improve ZeroTurnaround's GRM2 (tm) product line through mass contributions. He also mentioned, that he does not believe that forking will be an issue as ZeroTurnaround has applied for registration of the GRM2 (tm) trademark, so community will be better off contributing to the original project rather than starting their own efforts.

"We're going to boost efficiency even more by creating a fully-automated factory pipeline for building the GRM2 (tm)," continued Kabanov. "In the end, we decided against having a human workforce due to the increased risk of human error and the hazardous substances needed for GRM2 (tm) production.

Over the last four years, ZeroTurnaround has grown on average nearly 200% Y/Y, releasing LiveRebel, an app deployment automation platform, in 2011 and establishing its own in-house research & education arm, Rebel Labs, in Jan 2013. Just one month ago, the company made its first acquisition, taking control of Javeleon, a software duo based in Copenhagen that was incubated and rolled out of the University of Denmark.

Interested parties can expect the first deployments of GRM2 (tm) in the next month, provided there are no delays. To find out more information, interested parties can visit the ZeroTurnaround blog and the GitHub repo, where those who'd like to get more involved can learn more about the content, forking and contributing.