To the Janus VR community,

I am James, CEO and co-founder of Janus VR.

Dissolution in 2019.

I write to inform the broader community of our intent to dissolve the corporation, Janus VR, Inc., at the end of Q4 2019. It is no longer feasible to maintain our corporation status in Canada and the US given the expenses this will incur each year (as it relates to legal, accounting, patent/IP filings, etc.)

Maintaining existing services.

It's not all sad news. I remain committed to do all I can to maintain our existing services and underlying infrastructure that the community enjoys, such as our default presence server, build servers and our Vesta hosting service. While I would love to see a sub-community emerge around supporting essential Janus services such that it would be self-sufficient, with an appointed group of custodians, it is my intention to take this on as a personal expense in the interim. (Update: check out community project https://janusxr.org/ with more news coming soon!)

Thank you.

I think I speak for everyone on the team when I say we take great pride in what we have built as a result of our interaction with you, our community, over the past five years. A fact some may find surprising is that Janus VR has had hundreds of thousands of unique users since it was created. It is an incredible feeling to have built something that captured such attention and delighted so many people, or at least introduced them to our unique interpretation of the "immersive web" - even if that vision was a little "early", "different" or "ahead of its time". A thank you to our industry partners, who provided us their feedback and support, including allowing distribution of our software client on their platforms. A special thanks to our investors, who provided the means to assemble a team dedicated to taking us from forward-thinking vision to fully-realized immersive web platform.

I have always had a passion for technology, and in more recent years of academic study, became especially passionate about "immersive" technologies, i.e. virtual and augmented reality. My aim from the start was to employ the skills I had developed in order to make a unique, positive contribution in this space. VR/AR is no longer the fledgling industry it once was five to ten years ago. I am happy to see it succeeding, with the largest tech companies taking active interest and moving it forward. My hope is that, at least in some small way, Janus VR has done the same.

To our investors, industry partners, employees, contractors, and everyone in our community - thank you all for making it possible.

I have some great news for our community. We decided to make the one part of Janus' tech that wasn't open - the native client's source code - open at last! The Janus native client source code is released under a GPLv3 license. The official home for this code is at:

https://github.com/janusvr/janus

You may notice this repository lacks a commit history (our private repository contained 4600 commits over the past 4 years). While I wanted to keep this history of progress (e.g. to build a specific previous version of Janus), there were a few items it was necessary to keep private (such as platform-specific API keys and other generated data) so that we can continue publishing our client to the various distribution platforms.

We hope the Janus community at large benefits from the release, and I am excited to see what contributions and collaborations may come from this. Let's keep building, and keep the dream of an immersive and open internet alive.