Open Roadmap, Not Open Source

We want to be transparent about where Beacon is going without turning every conversation into a license debate.

What we share publicly

• Product vision and Safety Net architecture
• What works today vs what's on the roadmap
• Infrastructure direction (including Canadian hosting intent)
• How communities can pilot Lighthouse deployments
• Honest limitations - because credibility matters in emergencies

This guide is an example: open roadmap.

What stays proprietary (for now)

• Application source code
• Full implementation of auth, moderation, and notification pipelines
• Operational security details

We're a small team moving fast. Open-sourcing the entire product would slow that down before we've proven Safety Net in the field with real communities.

That doesn't mean closed doors

Transparency and open source aren't the same thing.

Trust: Open source says "read the repo." We say "read the roadmap, test the product, pilot with us."

Contribution: Open source says "send pull requests." We say "bring field pilots, hardware expertise, and place admins."

Interop: Open source says "fork us." We say "layer on standard web + LoRa hardware."

We may publish specifications over time - for example alert wire formats or Lighthouse integration guides - so builders can interoperate without us open-sourcing the entire app. That's a conversation we're open to as pilots mature.

For mesh and resilience builders

We respect the open mesh ecosystem. Meshtastic is open hardware and software; we integrate with it rather than reinvent it. We're not competing with Reticulum or Nostr - we're trying to bring their class of resilience to people who will never run a custom network stack, through a webpage they already know how to open.

If you're building in this space, we'd rather collaborate on deployments and interoperability than argue about licenses.