Add OpenHands Commercial Open Source Strategy documentation

docs.json

@@ -30,7 +30,8 @@
               "overview/first-projects",
               "overview/faqs",
               "overview/community",
-              "overview/contributing"
+              "overview/contributing",
+              "overview/strategy"
             ]
           },
           {

overview/strategy.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
+---
+title: OpenHands Commercial Open Source Strategy
+description: OpenHands' strategy to become the open standard for AI coding agents
+---
+
+## Vision
+
+
+OpenHands' vision is to become **the open standard for AI coding agents** — a foundation for AI software development that is transparent, extensible, and community-driven.
+
+
+## Problems We Solve
+
+
+### "Building With" OpenHands: Use OpenHands as an Inner Loop local AI coding agent
+
+
+**Problem:** Developers need a reliable and powerful AI coding agent to boost productivity.
+
+
+- Designed for most **individual developers**
+- **Ad-hoc usage** focused on local or small-team development
+- Solves **developer productivity** challenges
+- Provides **model-agnostic AI code assistance** that integrates locally
+- Operates in a **highly competitive** landscape with multiple alternatives
+
+
+### "Building On" OpenHands: Use OpenHands to solve repetitive engineering tasks
+
+
+**Problem:** Organizations need a way to reduce the toil and burden of recurring engineering tasks that distract from roadmap; and they seek solutions that can be scaled to nearly every development team in the organization. 
+
+- Designed for **teams and organizations — these tend to be Commercial entities**
+- Within organizations, used by **Agent Engineers** who build agents with OpenHands
+- Supports **repeatable, cloud-based workflows and automations.** Sometimes this is referred to as "Outer Loop" engineering tasks, such as PR reviews, security remediation, and documentation updates.
+- Enables **API-driven integration** into applications and development pipelines
+- Solves problems around **scalability, extensibility, and control**
+- Focused on enabling **custom agent orchestration**
+
+
+**Strategic Shift:**
+
+
+We're evolving OpenHands to support "Building On" use cases — turning OpenHands into a platform for scaling 100s of agents that address repetitive engineering problems
+
+
+## Example Use Cases — Repetitive Engineering Tasks
+
+
+OpenHands is used across a wide range of powerful, scalable use-cases in the SDLC process:
+
+
+- **Maintenance**
+    - Example: 30x throughput on CVE resolution
+    - Example: Automatic documentation and release notes
+- **Modernization**
+    - Example: Adding type annotations to an entire Python codebase
+    - Example: Refactoring a monolithic Java application to microservices
+- **Migration**
+    - Example: Upgrading 1000s of jobs from Spark 2 to Spark 3
+    - Example: Moving from Redux to Zustand
+- **Tech Debt**
+    - Example: Detecting and deleting unused code
+    - Example: Adding error handling based on production logs
+- **Automated Testing, Bug Fixing, Documentation**, etc.
+
+
+## Target Customers for OSS and Commercial
+
+
+### Open Source (OSS)
+
+
+- **Goal:** Empower individual developers with a model-agnostic, open, and extensible coding agent that integrates seamlessly into their workflows.
+- **Primary audience:** Individual developers on the bleeding edge of software development; AI hobbyists.
+- **Use cases:** Personal productivity, ad-hoc local development, experimentation, and contributing to open AI infrastructure.
+
+
+### Commercial
+
+- **Primary audience:** Mid-to-large enterprises and technical teams.
+- **Goal:** Help organizations safely leverage AI at scale to modernize, refactor, and maintain complex systems across 100s of development teams.
+- **User personas:**
+    - **Developers w/ AI experience:** Developers who already may be familiar with pairing with AI to accomplish work, but ready to begin delegating wholesale tasks to AI agents for maximum productivity.
+    - **Agent Engineers:** Developers on the edge of AI engineering who are looking to integrate agents into workflows or applications.
+- **Buyer personas:** Engineering Leaders
+- **Use cases:**
+    - "An OpenHands agent for every developer": Multi-user collaboration, scalability, governance, and security
+    - Refactoring and code modernization
+    - Embedding AI agents into apps and workflows
+
+
+## Dividing Lines Between OSS and Commercial
+
+_OpenHands' CEO and founder discusses the lines between OSS and Commercial in this blog post: [Walking the Line with Commercial Open Source (June 2025)](https://openhands.dev/blog/walking-the-line-with-commercial-open-source)_
+
+
+OpenHands follows an **Open Core** model:
+
+
+- **Open Source Core:**
+
+    The foundation of OpenHands is open and free for all developers. Most new features default to open source unless they explicitly solve enterprise-specific needs.
+
+- **Enterprise Offering:**
+
+    Focused on mid-to-large enterprises, addressing needs around multi-user management, scalability, and security.
+
+
+
+Our investment is roughly **50/50** between open source and commercial development.
+
+
+### **Feature Selection Principle**
+
+
+- **Developer problems → Open source by default:**
+
+    Features that solve an individual developer's needs belong in the open source core (e.g., productivity, model integration, developer tooling).
+
+- **Buyer problems → Commercial features:**
+
+    Features designed to solve organizational or managerial challenges are commercial (e.g., organizational management, collaboration, scalability).
+
+
+
+**Example:**
+
+
+- Commercial feature: Organizational Management — features for managing OpenHands access across hundreds of developers
+- Open Source: MCP support, Secrets Support, Planning Agent mode, etc.
+
+
+## Strategic Challenges
+
+
+1. **Large Product Portfolio**
+
+    Balancing focus and resources across a broad range of features and use cases.
+
+2. **Driving More Community Contributions**
+
+    Encouraging external contributors while maintaining code quality and stewardship.
+
+3. **Increasingly Crowded "Build With" Market:**
+
+    Differentiating in a competitive field of AI coding assistants.
+
+4. **Wide-Ranging Developer Profiles:**
+
+    Supporting diverse users — from new-to-AI developers to hobbyists to enterprise teams.
+
+
+
+## Unique Differentiators
+
+
+- **Open Source Foundation:** Transparent, extensible, and community-driven.
+- **Model-Agnostic Architecture:** Works with any LLM — the durable value lies in the agent layer, not the model.
+- **Cloud-First Scalability:** Supports persistent, autonomous cloud agents that can handle repetitive, large-scale tasks.
+- **Focus on Repetitive Tasks:** Automates ongoing engineering work — refactoring, maintenance, dependency upgrades — where AI delivers compounding value.
+- **Dual Persona Alignment:** Serves both individual developers ("Build With") and enterprise teams ("Build On") through a unified ecosystem.
+
+
+## Strategic Roadmap Pillars
+
+
+1. **Bet on Cloud Agents as the best way to work with AI coding agents**
+
+    Prioritize cloud-based runtimes for scalable, persistent, autonomous systems.
+
+2. **Shifting towards "Build On" to optimize for repetitive, high-leverage work**
+
+    Emphasize ongoing tasks like maintenance and refactoring over one-off code generation.
+
+3. **Maintain a high performance, model-agnostic approach**
+
+    Continue to integrate multiple models and support extensibility as the LLM ecosystem evolves.
+
+4. **Bridge both developer needs and enterprise needs**
+
+    Build pathways that help individual developers grow into organizational adopters — "Build With" → "Build On."
+
+5. **Foster a thriving Open Source community**
+
+    Grow contributor engagement, maintain transparent governance, and accelerate open development.
+
+
+
+## Commitment to Open Source
+
+
+We believe open source works best with clear stewardship and active participation.
+
+
+- We maintain the **roadmap** and **good first issues** to guide community contributions.
+- We **review pull requests diligently** and recognize valuable contributions.
+- We maintain **transparent metrics** across:
+    - **Community:** Total contributors and open PRs awaiting review.
+    - **Product Quality:** NPS and SaaS adoption as a proxy for user satisfaction.
+    - **Adoption:** Public reference examples and tutorials.
+    - **Impact:** Case studies highlighting enterprise deployments.
+
+
+### Our long-term commitment:
+
+
+To make OpenHands the **best open source generalized AI coding agent**, serving as the backbone of transparent, collaborative AI development.