After working for a failed dot-com during the millenial bubble, we decided it was time to try something different.

The software industry understands many things, and is good at solving various problems. Where it breaks down is in managing and dealing with creative personnel. Coming from a business background, the people normally running companies have no idea how the creative process works.

The theatre, on the other hand, has been dealing with the unique brand of problems imposed upon the world by the creative for centuries. We have developed mechanisms for running things organically over time. Perhaps some of them aren't optimized, but they sure do get the job done on a more consistent basis than in the software world.

At the same time, the Free Software movement has been developing its own, non-corporate methods of development that are creator-centric and produce astonishing results. Plus, they foster a sense of community and allow for the type of actual creative growth necessary for both software and theatre to flourish. It isn't Digital Rights Management that created the great works of the past, it was the ability of the artists to build upon each others work.

So what if we combined these? The philosophy of Free Software and the legacy of theatre? Of course, it doesn't hurt that we had always wanted to write a theatrical lighting controller and release it as Free Software.

We are committed to Free Software and an Open Process in all of our endeavors. It is only through sharing of creative capital that a community can truly flourish. We want to discover ways in which artists, be they theatre, film, photography or pottery, can give back to the community, much like Charles Mee's (re)making project

Let's foster the idea of software as just another discipline to exist in an artist's studio. Let's foster the idea of intellectual freedom rather than intellectual property.