Open-source

We ♥️ open-source

We love the open-source community, and we admire everyone participating in it. We believe the (IT) world of today wouldn’t be where it is, without all those great open-source projects.

Thus we’re committed to the open-source community, and we put as much of our work open-source as we can. This is also why our handbook is public by design.

Why open-source

Unfortunately, we’ve experienced many downsides with proprietary enterprise software, such as:

• Vendor lock-in: Data & processes which are hard, or impossible to migrate

• Licences: Expensive & complex licence models, which change whenever the vendor wants

• Black boxes: Closed source code, which we can’t inspect, fix, or extend

• Support: Slow support, which leaves us waiting instead of solving the problem ourselves

Open-source solves those problems for us. It’s transparent, it can be inspected, fixed & extended by anyone, and it lets us choose how, and where we run it. That’s why we deliberately don’t build on proprietary ecosystems (see Not our focus).

Open-source & AI

We believe open-source becomes even more important with AI:

• Understanding: AI assistants can read, understand, and fix open source code, but not a black box.

• Knowledge: AI is built on open knowledge, and open-source code, so sharing ours keeps that cycle going.

• Open standards: Open protocols, such as MCP, connect AI to our tools without locking us in.

• Trust: Open code makes it transparent what AI-generated, or AI-powered software actually does.

How we use it

Open-source is part of our daily work, and the foundation of almost everything we run, for example:

• Servers & platforms: Linux, Docker, Ansible, and our Proxy

• Development: GitLab, GitLab CI, and Harbor

• Monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Uptime Kuma

• Collaboration: Mattermost, Jitsi, Seafile, and Paperless

• Business: Odoo as our ERP

• Security: Keycloak, and Vaultwarden

Important

Whenever we evaluate a new tool or service, we always prefer an open-source solution.

How we give back

We don’t just use open-source, we also give back to the community:

• 🛠️ Contributions

  When we find a bug, or miss a feature in an open-source project, we report it, and contribute the fix upstream, instead of patching it only for ourselves.
• 📦 Own projects

  We publish our own projects as open-source, such as this handbook, or TINO (on GitHub).
• 💸 Sponsoring

  We financially support open-source projects & maintainers we rely on, such as Typst, and SilverBullet via GitHub Sponsors, and the Python Software Foundation.
• ⏱️ Working time

  Contributing to open-source projects is part of your job, so the time you spend on it counts as working time.