If I disappear, 32°N doesn't.
The source is on GitHub. Anyone with the skills can pick it up — or pay someone to. The project's continuity doesn't depend on me staying around.
Open source
The code is public. That matters more on a boat than you'd think.
Most software is a black box. You install it and use it, but you can't see what it does inside, you can't change it, and you can't run your own copy. The company that made it controls all of that.
Open-source is the opposite. The code that makes 32°N work is publicly available. Anyone can read it, run it, modify it, copy it, or share it. There's no company sitting on top of the project with the keys.
The problem with proprietary marine tech
Boats outlive software companies.
My boat will probably outlive the company that sold me the chartplotter I'm looking at. When that company disappears, gets acquired, drops support for the hardware, raises prices, or just decides my model isn't worth maintaining — and they all eventually do something on that list — the software stops getting updates. Features get pulled. Subscriptions get cancelled. Cloud services go offline.
This isn't hypothetical. It happens in adjacent industries every year: older MFDs lose chart-update support, marine apps get acquired and watch features migrate to higher tiers, cloud-based services go offline when vendors pivot. The pattern is the same — the vendor controls the relationship and you have no leverage when it changes.
What open-source changes
The code is yours, the project is yours.
Four things become true the moment the source is public.
Run the whole thing yourself.
Don't trust me with your boat data? Fork the code, run the stack on your own server. You never have to talk to me again. The licence guarantees you can.
Security and privacy claims are verifiable.
Anyone with the skills can read the code and check whether 32°N actually does what I say it does. With closed software, you're taking the vendor's word for it.
Free forever. As a personal commitment.
No subscription, no premium tier, no "32°N Plus." MIT permits monetisation legally — the "free forever" promise is mine, personally. If you'd rather not trust it, fork the code and run your own copy.
Why MIT specifically
A permissive licence, honest about the trade.
There are many open-source licences. I picked one of the most permissive in common use: MIT.
MIT keeps the source open and lets anyone read, run, modify, and redistribute the code. It doesn't legally prevent monetisation — someone (including me) could in theory build a paid product on top of 32°N tomorrow. The "free forever" promise is a personal commitment, not a structural guarantee.
I considered AGPL-3.0 — the stricter licence that forces anyone running the software as a service to share their source. That's a real protection against monetisation. I gave it up because AGPL conflicts with Apple App Store distribution terms, which would have meant either no iOS app or a licence-exception clause that adds friction for contributors. The trade was "structural guarantee against monetisation" vs "App Store reach." I picked reach.
The honest version of this story: if you don't trust the personal commitment, the right answer isn't to read a licence carefully — it's to fork the code and run your own copy. MIT permits that explicitly. The same source is available, the same stack works, no permission required. Open-source's real insurance against vendor capture is your ability to walk away with the code.
MIT
FREE
FOREVER
Licensed under MIT, top to bottom. The source is public. If I ever break the "free forever" promise, the source is still there — fork it and run your own.
Honest trade-offs
Open-source isn't a magic answer.
Three things worth being upfront about:
- There's no big-vendor support team. I'm one person. If you want SLAs and a 24/7 phone number, 32°N isn't that. A community of contributors may build over time; it's early days.
- You still maintain the hardware. The Mac mini, the NMEA-2000 gateway, the wiring — that's physical and that's on you. Open-source software, real hardware.
- Forking only helps if someone forks. If I disappear and nobody picks the project up, the code still exists but nobody's developing it. Open-source guarantees the possibility of continuity, not the certainty.
For me the trade is straightforward: I'd rather build something that can outlive me and any company I might form, than something that depends on me staying around forever for my own boat's tech to keep working.
The repository
It's all public, right now.
You don't have to wait for a release. The code is on GitHub and the issues list is the backlog. Fork it, read it, open a pull request, or just poke around.
github.com/32north-ai/platform
The full platform monorepo — apps, cloud services, the OS components, the data bus, the AI gateway. Licensed MIT. Issues, pull requests, and the roadmap are all in there.
Repository github.com/32north-ai/platform
Licence MIT
Contributing CONTRIBUTING.md
Code of conduct CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
Free. Forever. As a commitment.
I built 32 degrees North because I wanted it on my own boat. MIT keeps the source open; the commitment to "free forever" is mine, personally. The escape hatch — fork the code and run it yourself — is permanent.