Open Source

Everything we build is published as source. You can read it, build it, run it, and change it to suit you. What we publish is what we run: there is no separate edition held back, and nothing in the product that only exists somewhere you cannot look.

Three things follow from that. You can verify what the software actually does, rather than taking a description of it on trust. You have control over how it is distributed — including running a modified copy that never comes back to us. And you are free to improve it: fix what is broken for you, add what is missing, and keep the result.

It is published under AGPLv3. We chose it because it is open and fair. It grants the freedoms above without attaching conditions we would not want applied to us, and it asks the same of anyone who builds on the work. The full text is published by the Free Software Foundation.

Bugs are reported and tracked in public. What is broken, what we already know about, and what has been fixed are visible without anyone having to ask us. A defect that is only visible to the people who caused it is a defect nobody can plan around.

The roadmap is public. What we are working on, what we have decided against, and the reasoning behind both. Knowing that something will never be built is more useful than not knowing, even when it is not the answer you wanted.

The feedback loop runs in both directions. You can argue with a decision while it is still a decision, rather than discovering it in a release note. We make the final calls, and we would rather make them having heard the case against.

Running it yourself is a supported way to use what we make. It is documented and tested as such, rather than a route left open for anyone stubborn enough to work it out unaided. The self-hosted path is not the lesser one.

Put it on your own infrastructure and the arrangement ends there. Your data stays where you put it, you decide when anything changes, and you stay independent of us entirely if that is what suits you.

The hosted service is the same code, operated by us. Someone has to provision the machines, apply the updates, take the backups and answer when it breaks. That work is what the fee is for — never access to the software.