Why all the secrecy with Axiom?

apertus° is an open project with free people collaborating so why all the secrecy? Why not open all the discussion and details about Axiom and let everyone participate like it is common for open source projects? The following paragraph tries to explain our reasons.

apertus° is currently at a major turning point. We are attempting to transform apertus° from a purely community driven project (with lots of great people but unfortunately no responsibility) into a commercial entity that emerges from within the community (and takes the responsibility). Axiom is putting the project on a cliffs edge. Now we reached a point where we can only advance forward with Axiom with money - a lot of money. And that makes things complicated. So we considered the best way to raise this money: a pre-sale crowd funding campaign. That way the money comes from a community of filmmakers which seemed like a natural connection for apertus° instead of trying to find traditional investors who are - blatantly said - just interested in profits of a growing start up. Crowd funding is a very risky endeavor though, with all-or-nothing (Street Performer Protocol) campaigns we either raise the required amount of money or the project is dead. A rather scary prospect since we devoted years of our time into this project already. So we analyzed what makes a crowd funding campaign successful: beside obviously having to pitch an awesome product and a sophisticated plan in a convincing way it all comes down to getting broad media attention at the right time leading to a big amount of people visiting the crowd funding website and eventually backing the project financially.

When we announced Axiom during LSM this summer and some blogs and news websites picked up the story our website traffic suddenly spiked at around 1400% of our normal average. The following days we received quite an amount of emails. So we figured the crowd funding campaign will need a big bang start. We will need to surprise (or better "shock") the whole world as intensely as possible. But you can only surprise with something that nobody knows yet. So that's reason number 1.

Reason number 2 is that we want to avoid public confusion: People scanning over technical discussions can quickly get a wrong impression of what was being considered, what was decided or dropped and what was working and implemented and maybe dropped a bit later on again. And the apertus° community consists of all kinds of different people with different occupations and from different parts of the world. After all we are all humans and have different views on things. We already saw big blogs/news portals publishing wrong information or rumors as a result from this. Of course we could attempt to spot and correct errors constantly, but would that really help reduce confusion or just create even more of it?
So we decided to rather prepare all facts properly and in a way they can not be misunderstood - nicely illustrated and clearly explained reducing potential confusion to a minimum.

This is the path we chose and now we stick to it.

Developer Program

But to be honest we hate that we cannot publicly discuss Axiom with everyone. We are so eager to learn what you think of it and give you a chance to interact and participate in its creation.

So we are considering an Axiom developer program at the moment giving developers early access.

We will post more details about the program soon.