Philosophy
Operating the infrastructure of websites can seem like a huge undertaking and an operational burden that's just not worth bearing unless you want to spend all of your spare time attending to your servers.
The alternative is to use a cloud provider that handles all the infrastructure for you, but at the cost of control.
For the vast majority of people, this is a great deal, which they take very happily, and it's usually the right choice.
But most people are not engineers.
If you are an engineer, it feels like you should be operating your own website, but you secretly don't want to.
The open source technical tools tend to be quite complex, usually aimed at tech enthusiasts who enjoy wrangling with the complexity of it!
Many of us, however, don't. We already deal with enough complexity at work.
Sprouts/Gardener lowers the operational complexity by simplifying the underlying infrastructure and building blocks.
You can own your website's infrastructure without worrying about it.
Larger Vision
Although the initial release of Sprouts focuses on static content, the intent is to allow interacting with visitors and fostering a community.
The internet, at its core, is a two-way communication medium. At minimum, we need to have:
- Comments on published content
- Engaging discussion forums
- Chat rooms with browsable archive
- Email Subscriptions
- Analytics
Philosophy Q & A
Q: Is this open source?
No, but we plan to make it source-available, meaning you can read the source and make changes to it for your own use, but not redistribute it for free.
We also release some components as open source, such as the reverse proxy HoTCo:RE, and the cross-platform GUI framework shi•rei.