Statement of Social Purpose

As a Social Purposes Corporation in the State of Washington, Home Grown Systems, SPC is required by law to provide shareholders a statement of the corporation's social purpose and to provide shareholders with an annual report of the corporation's actions related to those social purposes within the prior year.

Home Grown Systems, SPC is committed to helping small and medium sized organizations learn about and adopt free and open software systems and solutions within their operational structures with the purpose of freeing them from both fiscal and artificial technical constraints often levied upon them by closed and proprietary information systems.

Although free and open source information systems are already heavily and widely used and relied upon in large businesses, Home Grown Systems, SPC recognizes that smaller and medium sized organizations often turn first to inferior solutions that are, at least, familiar. It is the purpose of Home Grown Systems, SPC to help small and medium sized businesses expand upon what is familiar so that smaller organizations may benefit from the thinking that already benefits large organizations.

Smaller organizations often do not possess the financial resources necessary to research and adopt new technologies that would prove beneficial not only to themeselves but sometimes to the greater open and free systems community who might learn from their use cases to better their own offerings. It is in this light that Home Grown Systems, SPC may set aside the interest of short-term profit to the larger interest of the betterment of technologies that serve our organzations and their members.

Progress in the Second Year (2015-2016)

Home Grown Systems, SPC found itself in a position of intense focus upon one major client at a cost to many other efforts throughout the first quarter and into the second. This client was in the process of solidifying and organizing systems in prepration for a buyout from a foreign company and Home Grown Systems, SPC was tasked with much of the work creating systems on the production floor and organizing the server infrastructure.

Home Grown Systems, SPC also provided consultation for a large foreign-based company that required integration of their new purchase, both in hardware, software and legacy accounting systems.

During this time Home Grown Systems, SPC also began work on a payment and shopping cart system for a client that is intended for subsequent open-sourcing, which utilized all open and free technologies such as Perl, PHP, Nginx and PostgreSQL.

Home Grown Systems, SPC also supported development efforts of a contributor to the Perl 6 project whose technogies are greatly anticipated as they continue to evolve.

We have identified that HGS will steer more away from hardware-based products and instead focus on systems based approaches where vendor, product and pricing volatility is not as large an issue.

Progress in the First Year (2014-2015)

Home Grown Systems, SPC was formed on August 29, 2014, establishing Corporate Bylaws that, in Article 8 Section 1 state, under the heading of Responsibility, "The Board of Directors, officers and shareholders must consider the impact upon the social purposes of the corporation with all resolutions or actions considered or passed."

One of the first actions of the Board ratified a customer discount program that rewards customers with significantly reduced rates on consulting, development and maintenance services when they adopt free and open software solutions into their organization. Further, the program rewards customers with even further rate discounts if they help contribute back help in one form or another to the free and open systems community.

A small hardware product line was developed that utilizes free and open software, targeted to small and medium business that offers basic Internet and network infrasture services as well as low powered yet highly efficient workstation replacements. This enables organizations to more confidently "test the waters" of free and open systems, while increasing their scope of what is familiar.

Particularly successful has been the deployment of free and open systems as work stations on a company's manufacturing floor which provides low-cost access for their employees to both technical drawings and company email.

Home Grown Systems, SPC also considers off-site storage of an organization's data, for backups or otherwise, to not be entirely without risk of exploitation. As such, HGS has made great strides in developing enterprise grade backup solutions that are cross-platform, which maintains all company data on-site and/or off-site, and only in those physical locations that remain under control of that company. The company interested in this solution is currently using it to great effect and HGS continues to re-tool it for more widespread adoption.

HGS is also currently working to legally define a means to allow work on client's custom projects, when they elect, and offering them a sizeable discount in exhange for their release of claims of rights to those systems that are developed for them, so that the effort put into those system's creation might be shared back to the free and open systems community to the benefit of all.