Box Offers New Open Source Initiative Ahead Of $250m IPO

Box has launched a new open source initiative entitled Box Open Source aimed at giving back to the wider community in the shape of a range of different tools.

The storage start-up announced the service through a tweet from chief executive Aaron Levie where he admitted that “Box couldn’t exist without open source projects,” before reiterating that the company wants to give back.

“We want to offer high-quality code that is configurable, extensible, and well documented. All of our projects are required to have installation instructions, unit testing, documentation, and follow good design principles,” said principal technical operations developer Benjamin VanEvery on the company’s blog.

Box’s shared tools have been used by its own developers for some time and the firm’s different teams of engineers have already contributed 20 open source projects that are all showcased at opensource.box.com. The open source projects have been written in a variety of programming languages including PHP, Python, and JavaScript spanning applications as wide as unit testing, systems and database monitoring, and rendering HTML5.

Looking forward, Box wants to make sure that its projects are always showing improvements and keeping them in tip-top shape is a big part of the company’s remit.

“Looking into the future we want to ensure that our projects are healthy and always improving, to this end we also require each project have a team committed to maintaining it. Over the past half year, we have been piloting and refining a process to assure that all projects we share with the world meet these characteristics,” VanEvery added.

Box is currently gearing up for an IPO that should see the company raise over $250 million [£151 million] – almost half the amount that it was originally rumoured to be looking at raising from the IPO after filing confidential papers with the SEC.