At S4 we believe in accountability, transparency, and we are passionate about open source software. We also believe in a lot of other things, but those are the most relevant to this document. We have chosen to make this list publicly visible so you can see how we are running and constantly developing our hosting platform. Some people might argue that this is a bad idea for ‘security through obscurity’ reasons, but we disagree.
Important note: We believe that everyone should be using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) but that everyone should also understand that the Free in FOSS should refer to liberty and not always to price. If you do use FOSS programs in place of commercial ones then please consider supporting those project, either financially or with time and contributions. You can find more of our thoughts on that in this blog post.
How we contribute to FOSS
All members of the S4 team are encouraged to use 10% of their paid working hours to contribute to open source projects.
We are also supporting some projects by providing free infrastructure and financial sponsorship, and this is something that we intend to expand on in the future.
You can find more about the projects that we donate to financially on our Open Collective page. Currently they include:
- The PHP Foundation
- Matomo Analytics
- Flarum
- FOSSBilling
The FOSS we follow
You can find a regularly updated list of the open source software that we use, as well as the projects that we don’t currently use but are following, on GitHub: S4 – Open Source We Use