Why Open Source Matters for School Safety Technology

When a panic button is pressed in a school, there is zero room for software bugs, hidden vulnerabilities, or untested edge cases. Lives depend on every line of code working exactly as intended.

That's why SafeSchoolOS.com is open source under the AGPL license.

Open source means every school district, every security researcher, every concerned parent can inspect the code that protects their children. There are no black boxes. No "trust us, it works." Just transparent, auditable code that the community can verify and improve.

The security industry has long relied on "security through obscurity" — hiding code behind proprietary licenses and hoping no one finds the bugs. But we've learned time and again that this approach fails. The most secure software in the world — Linux, OpenSSL, Signal Protocol — is open source.

We chose AGPL specifically because it ensures that any organization that modifies SafeSchoolOS.com and offers it as a service must share those modifications with the community. This prevents large companies from taking our code, adding proprietary features, and locking schools back into silos.

Open source also means that if SafeSchoolOS.com Foundation ever stopped operating, the code would live on. Schools would never be left without their safety system because a company went bankrupt or was acquired.

This is too important to be proprietary.