I spend a lot of time thinking about where open source helps a software business — and where companies use the label while extracting more than they return. Building SpartanAuth has made that less abstract for me. I care about doing right by developers, and I also need a business that can sustain the work through Masonite Studios.

One quick boundary, because accuracy matters: SpartanAuth the service is not open source. What is open source is the login widget library, and I am proud of that. The rest of this post is about industry patterns I see, not a claim that my whole stack is OSS.

When I started SpartanAuth, I had a simple obsession: authentication should be easy to do correctly. Complexity is where security bugs and abandoned sign-ins both hide. Today I want to talk about the login widget.

Why build a widget?

TLDR: usability, branding, and making the secure path the easy path.

Businesses lose real money when people cannot sign in. “About a third of online purchases are abandoned at checkout because consumers cannot remember their passwords,” from a study conducted jointly by MasterCard and the University of Oxford (source). That is a big reason I care about helping apps move away from relying on passwords.