Why We Open-Sourced Alice

The glass box is now actually made of glass.

For years we’ve told people that Alice is a glass box, not a black box. That you should be able to see through the dashboard — past the pretty number, down to the exact query that produced it. That you ought to trust your data infrastructure the way you trust your physical infrastructure: because you can inspect it, not because a vendor swore it was fine.

There was always one uncomfortable gap in that pitch. You could see through the dashboard. You couldn’t see through us. The engine doing the fusing, the connectors prying records out of a FoxPro file nobody has dared touch since the second Bush administration, the logic that decided what “audit-ready” actually meant — all of it lived behind our walls. And a glass box you aren’t allowed to open is just a black box with a better marketing page.

Today we’re closing that gap. The core of Alice is now open source, under the Apache 2.0 license. You can read every line, run it in your own environment, fork it, and audit exactly what it does with your data. The repo is here: github.com/TheMadBotterINC/alice.

I want to explain why, because the reasoning matters more than the announcement — and because “we open-sourced our product” is the kind of thing that makes a certain type of founder assume you’ve either lost your mind or your funding. Neither happened. This is the most deliberate thing we’ve done all year.

The moat was never the code

There’s an old reflex in software that says your source is your secret sauce — guard it, obfuscate it, and whatever you do, don’t let the customer see how the sausage is made.

That reflex is mostly wrong, and it’s especially wrong for what Alice does. The hard part of legacy data work has never been the code. It’s knowing that the “date” column in a 1998 manufacturing system is actually stored as a string in three incompatible formats. It’s the connector you’ve maintained and hardened across a dozen real migrations. It’s being the team that can walk into a shop, look at a load-bearing Access database held together with prayer, and tell you the truth about it in a week. It’s running the thing reliably, at 2 a.m., when an export fails and an audit is on Monday.

Red Hat figured this out a long time ago: you can give away the source and build a serious business on the expertise, the operation, and the trust around it. The code being open doesn’t hand a competitor your business. It hands a developer a tool — and that’s the point.

So open-sourcing the engine costs us very little of what’s actually valuable, and it buys us something we couldn’t get any other way.

Trust is the whole product

Here’s the thing about the customers we serve — aviation MROs, heavy-civil contractors, regulated shops working under CUI and ITAR and CMMC. When we ask them to let a piece of software reach into their fleet records and maintenance history, “trust us, it’s fine” is not a sentence that lands. Nor should it.

The honest answer to “what is this thing doing with our data?” is to show them. Alice runs inside your environment — your cloud or your own metal. It doesn’t phone home. Your data never comes to us. And now, when your security team asks what’s in the box, the answer is: here’s the box, here’s every line in it, bring your own auditors. For a buyer who has been burned by opaque platforms and surprise data egress, that’s not a feature. It’s the difference between a yes and a no.

We’ve been saying “no lock-in, you own the stack” for years. As of today, you can verify it instead of taking our word for it.

What’s open, and what isn’t — no games

I won’t insult you with the pretense that this is pure altruism. Open core is a business model, and I’d rather be straight about where the line sits than have you find it later and feel played.

Alice — the open-source project — is the engine. The hot-and-cold data fusion (built on Postgres and pg_lake), the glass-box query and transformation layer, the legacy connectors, the self-hosting path. If you have a data team and you want to own this end to end, Alice is genuinely everything you need. Take it. Run it. Don’t pay us a dime.

Looking Glass is the commercial product — the managed control plane, the concierge operation, the enterprise governance and support, the part where we run it for you so it never fogs up. If you’d rather hand the whole thing to the people who wrote it, that’s what you’re buying.

And here’s the commitment that makes open core trustworthy instead of a bait-and-switch: we will never move something out of the open core to force you onto Looking Glass. The engine stays open. We grow the commercial product by making the managed experience worth paying for, not by holding the open one hostage.

This is just who we are

If you’ve listened to Coder Radio for any length of time, none of this should surprise you. We’re the Linux-on-the-desktop, run-it-on-your-own-hardware, reliability-over-hype shop. I spend my weekends pulling AI workloads back behind my own firewall because I’d rather own the thing than rent it and pray the bill doesn’t triple next quarter.

In that light, shipping a closed box while preaching open infrastructure was the actual dissonance. This release just makes the company match its convictions. In an era where every tool wants to become a metered cloud subscription you can never leave, owning your data infrastructure outright is the reliable choice — and reliability is the only kind of hype we’re interested in.

What you can do with it

• Self-host it. Clone the repo, docker compose up, point it at the synthetic legacy data we ship with it, and watch a FoxPro export and a “master Excel file” fuse into one model you can actually audit. Five minutes.
• Contribute. We especially want connectors. If you’ve got a legacy source from hell, that’s exactly the kind of pull request that makes this project better for everyone.
• Hand it to us. If you’d rather not staff a data team to run it, that’s Looking Glass — same engine, operated by the people who built it.

The dashboard was always supposed to be see-through. Now the rest of it is too.

Come look inside: github.com/TheMadBotterINC/alice

— Mike Dominick
The Mad Botter INC