If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan - ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science)

In 2023, CrabNebula raised a seed round led by OSS Capital and many of the worlds most successful open source founders, including Naval Ravikant, Automattic Inc., Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Ram Shriram (Founding angel in Google), Tod Sacerdoti (CEO, Pipedream), Austen Allred, Justin Hoffman (former SVP of Elastic), Tom Preston-Werner (Former GitHub Cofounder), Thomas Dohmke (CEO of GitHub), Dave Teare (Founder of 1Password), Adam Wiggins (Cofounder, Heroku), Naveen Rudrappa (Founder NocoDB), Emad Mostaque (CEO Stability AI), Cassidy Williams (CTO of Contenda), Tejas Kumar, Spencer Kimball (CEO & Cofounder of Cockroach Labs), Paul Copplestone (CEO & Cofounder, Supabase), Heather Meeker (General Partner, OSS Capital), Clement Delangue (Cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face), and Bob Young (Former CEO RedHat).

“Open Source works best where the consumers of the software are also able to contribute to its development. Tauri is the next generation of software development and the CrabNebula team’s decision to develop Tauri in the open and in collaboration with the worldwide community of Tauri users will ensure better tools faster.” - Bob Young

You can listen on Changelog to Daniel talk about CrabNebula, its relationship with Tauri and open source software, and what the future might hold for an expanded notion of ecosystem collaboration and innovation.

Changelog Interviews 560: Tauri’s next big move – Listen on Changelog.com

What is CrabNebula’s mission?

We empower developers to create better apps that are privacy-centered and secure-by-design: on all platforms and form-factors.

Since November of 2022, we have sustained the velocity of Tauri’s OSS community by contributing code, auditing code changes for every minor release, and even acquiring public-sector grants - like the R&D project to unify Tauri and Servo.

Are you interested in joining the open-source community and participating in upcoming research and development opportunities at the cutting edge of application interfaces and browser-tech? Get in touch!

We fill the gaps that the OSS community struggles with. We love Tauri and we support Tauri, but we are not Tauri. Just like the relationship our friends at Portfolio Sister Company W4 Games have with the phenomenal Godot Game engine, we exist to help the community grow and build value.

However, we make products and services that empower the entire application development and delivery lifecycle - from development, to quality-assurance, to production, to maintenance. We provide the knowledge and expertise that can only come from the people that are responsible for more than 90% of Tauri’s codebase.

As a milestone on that journey, today we are releasing the first version of the Apache-2 / MIT licensed agnostic cross-platform application packager. Based on our experience with Tauri’s bundler and updater, we have taken it upon ourselves to now make this mission critical library available for all Rust-based desktop projects - and in the near future any type of binary for any platform.

The framework agnostic packager integrates tightly into our planet scale distribution service for application delivery, updating, and monitoring - that will enter public beta later this year. Meet us at EURORUST in October 2023 to learn more.

If you run an OSS project that needs app distribution, please get in touch to find out about our special offers for you and your community!

How did we get here?

Back in 2019, we promised ourselves that someday we would only be working on Tauri. We would start a company and sustain the amazing people behind what was then only a budding open source community. In order to make sure our future selves couldn’t sell out or rug-pull the community, in mid 2020, we started the long process of joining the Commons Conservancy, a Dutch foundation that exists to host the moral and legal stewardship of open source projects.

At that time we were about 8 or 9 people in the day to day and night to night work of building Tauri. All of us had day jobs in various software companies, and that meant long nights and weekends. (This is nothing new for anyone who has been in the trenches of open-source for long enough.)

The few donations we received at our opencollective page would never have been enough for us to pay a single engineer to work full time on Tauri. Some companies actually paid for a few engineers to focus on Tauri and thereby “donated” code to the community, but the realities of business meant that work on Tauri always had to take a backseat for whatever products the respective companies were building. Again, this story should sound really familiar to the millions of engineers building open source.

Along this journey, over at Tauri we were asked similar questions over and over again: Is my approach secure? Is Tauri the right thing for me to use? How can I improve the performance of my app? Can I pay you to build something for me? How can I distribute my apps? Can these builds be any faster? How the heck does signing work, and do I need it?

It’s really quite obvious when you look at it: there is no way for an OSS community of volunteers to accept work-assignments or even write invoices. And yet, the community requires regular support.

So that’s why, back in April of this year we closed the Seed round - because every apple tree has to grow from a well nourished seed. Follow us on our journey of helping everyone bake some delicious Tauri pie.

Authors:

• Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, Chief Executive Officer at CrabNebula

• Lucas Nogueira, Chief Technology Officer at CrabNebula

• Elizabeth Duck, Chief Operating Officer at CrabNebula