A clear case for Open Source

Note: this blog post is quite old

We have since released our new website, perhaps this page doesn’t look quite like you expected.

If you think this post is still a useful resource, and it doesn’t look or work as expected, please send us a message.

open source

At Greenhost we depend on Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). Not only is it essential for our daily operations, using this type of software is one of our core values. That is why we made a dedicated home for all of our FLOSS projects at https://greenhost.io. This site houses our FLOSS projects and makes it possible to easily track updates in one place. We encourage you to have a look, use the tools we made and build upon our code.

Greenhost has been using and contributing FLOSS code since it was founded thirteen years ago. FLOSS helped us to flourish as a company  and it helped each of us to learn and understand how computers and programs work. Our work today would not have been possible without the thriving and committed work of the FLOSS community. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants' aptly describes the worth and values of the Free Libre Open Source Software community.

As we, one revelation at a time, come to grasp the span of the surveillance complex, Open Source software seems an essential tool to make a stand. If you can't look under the hood there is no reason to trust the machine and we need trust worthy machines. We need machines running code that keeps our communication limited to the intended sender and expected receiver. We need strongly encrypted communications with openly audited code. Not only do we need to get rid of intentional backdoors, forced upon companies by governments or other parties, we also need to fix our own code. Using Eric S. Raymond words: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". If we are going to fix the internet it will be with the support of the Open Source giants who will happily carry us along on their shoulders

Today we present our vision as a company and as concerned citizens, at the Let's Fix the Internet meeting. Our company, like all ISPs, maintains a part of the infrastructure that runs the Internet, a network  that we all hold dear and on which we increasingly depend. We keep thousands of websites available and deliver email to and from our customers. With great power comes great responsibility. Our case in favour of FLOSS is clear and is similar to that of any company depending on or even building the internet. We therefore call upon other companies to make FLOSS and its principles a core value of their enterprises.

We look forward to expand https://greenhost.io with more software, better documentation and projects that can be useful to the open source community as a whole.