Startmate open sources their legal documentation: start-up bliss!

I’ve worked in IT (or related fields) all my working career and have been a huge beneficiary of open source software. It’s such a smart practice and provides immense business leverage.

Without open source software, trillions of work hours would be wasted each month across the globe solving problems which have already been well solved in the past by others. This adds economic benefit to everyone involved in IT, and to businesses generally.

I used to work on building content management systems which cost north of a quarter of a million dollars for each client. WordPress now makes a better project cost in the low thousands. This is good for all parties and results in more efficient work and sees money spent on things which add more value.

I could go on about how powerful open-source software is. But I think the point is clear!

I’ve often wondered, though, why it’s only nerds which seem to have embraced the open-source approach. Why isn’t it done in marketing?

Or law? Talk about an industry which looks to repeatedly solve the same problem over and over. And for $300 an hour at that.

Well, today Startmate, an Australian incubator and supporter of online businesses open-sourced their legal documents.

What an awesome thing to do for entrepreneurs across Australia.

For any small online business, there’s significant cost in setting up these documents. Now most of the heavy lifting has been done for them by providing a clean, well structured set of documents from which to start working on.

I bet they had many folks suggesting otherwise. But they did it.

And by doing so, it means a solved-problem is available to more people for less cost. So dollars can be spent on things which aren’t yet solved.

Well done Startmate. Big respect. From actions, not words.