Endless Access Open Source
We’re a strong proponent of Free and Open Source Software as open, public access to technology and information is critical to our mission. We embrace the principles and practices of open source, and acknowledge a great debt to it.
Why Open Source?
Open source software and openly-licensed resources are key to our vision of every learner in the world having the skills and tools to lead an empowered life: knowledge itself as well as the tools to access it and build skills must be available to all. Further, they must be able to be freely redistributed, built upon, and adapted by others in order to scale to reaching every learner.
Our Origins
Our work started over a decade ago as a company focused on providing access to affordable computers. In addition to the computers themselves, we designed the simple, easy-to-use Endless OS and suite of offline-capable knowledge apps to ensure that everyone—regardless of income or Internet connectivity—could have access to information, skills, and the opportunities that personal computers unlock. From the very beginning, we built Endless OS and our apps on a solid foundation of open source software and openly-licensed resources.
While we’ve always had a social impact mission at our heart, we officially relaunched our efforts as a nonprofit organization in 2020. This allowed us to focus directly on impact over for-profit goals, investors, sales strategies, and capturing value. Open source became even more critical to us as a way to maximize our impact: by releasing our work under open licenses, working upstream, being active in open source communities, and contributing back to open source projects whenever possible, our efforts positively affect people far beyond those we could reach alone. For example, our work has reached millions of users of software such as Linux, GNOME, and Flathub—far more than users of our own computers or Endless OS alone.
Today
More recently, we’ve focused our mission specifically on empowering the next generation of digital creators through a global community and innovative tools to spark creativity, foster collaboration, and build future-ready skills. We continue to develop Endless OS and contribute to related open source projects, but much of our work is focused on supporting our game-making learning programs. We’ve developed open source plugins for Godot Engine including Block Coding and moddable games, and we—along with our community of learners and contributors—are developing Threadbare, a completely open source game where learners help a world through real code, art, and storytelling.
Beyond software, we release the learning materials for our programs under open licenses to allow similar redistribution and remixing. In developing these programs, we’ve established the following principles as our pedagogy, or approach to teaching:
- Play matters
- Create for impact
- Share often; be open
- Reflect and refine
- Learning is not linear
- Everyone belongs
These principles are woven into everything we do, and strongly echo the open source philosophy: the freedom to access and modify source code encourages tinkering and play; open source projects are far more impactful by being freely redistributed and adapted; sharing often and being open are the very core of what open source is; peer review and open source release processes offer opportunities for constant reflection and refinement; there are countless pathways to open source contribution as opposed to a single linear one; and of course, open source software champions the idea of everyone being able to contribute and belong regardless of their background.
Our learning programs and community teach and encourage both these principles and broader open source practices. In doing so, we hope to instill these principles and help ensure the continued availability and culture of openly licensed software and information—ultimately enabling every learner in the world to have the skills and tools to lead an empowered life.
Learning Programs
The materials for our scaffolded, ready-to-run learning pathways are released under a Creative Commons license to allow reuse, redistribution, and adaptation. We encourage remixing, translating, and using our materials to support our mission across the globe.
Games & Plugins
We develop Threadbare, the open source game where learners help a world through real code, art, and storytelling. We’ve built and released We also develop open source plugins for Godot Engine for use in learning environments, including Block Coding, Moddable Platformer, and Moddable Pong.
GNOME & Linux
We develop and maintain Endless OS, an open source Linux-based operating system that supports our device access program. In doing so, we’ve made notable contributions to projects such as GNOME, Kolibri, Flatpak, Flathub, OSTree, the Linux kernel, and more.
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