When you leave a proprietary vendor, you inherit the jobs it used to do: governance, legal, security, and giving back. Use our new free tool, the OSPO Roadmap, to map those jobs, track where you stand, and name who owns each. No login. Live now.
Kai A. Hartung
An office suite just set an all-time download record for what it left out. LibreOffice 26.8 hit 1,031,162 installs in a week with no AI, and a million people were escaping the feature Microsoft keeps adding to yours. In rented software, the next change is never yours to make.
Open source rarely fails on the code. It fails when something breaks and no one is accountable to call. Today I'm opening OpenTechHub's Service Provider layer: a directory of verified companies that build, host, and support open source, so anyone leaving vendor lock-in has somewhere to turn.
The company behind Formbricks, an open source, self-hostable platform for surveys and customer feedback.
An Indian AI automation studio that builds custom AI agents and maintains the open source Meetily meeting assistant.
A Vienna provider of sovereign, self-hosted generative AI infrastructure for European enterprises.
A Swiss IT consultancy focused on advisory, security, and compliance for small and mid-sized organizations.
Encrypted collaboration and storage, assembled from open source and hosted in Germany with client-side encryption.
Most companies quietly maintain their own private copies of open source software, and the upkeep costs far more than anyone puts on the books. The Linux Foundation measured the bill. Contributing your changes back is the cheaper path, and this is why forking almost always loses.
MIT-licensed platform that builds, versions and hosts docs-as-code from Git, with pull-request previews and search. Self-hosting sidesteps the paid hosted tiers but runs a heavy multi-service stack.
Real-time distributed OLAP datastore for user-facing analytics at high concurrency. Apache-governed. A heavy multi-node cluster; managed ops and anomaly detection are the commercial StarTree.
Real-time analytics database for sub-second queries on streaming and batch data, Apache-governed. A heavy distributed cluster to operate; managed ops and the Pivot BI console are the commercial Imply.
Real-time MPP OLAP database that queries open lakehouse tables directly. Apache-licensed, Linux Foundation-governed. A distributed cluster to run; masking and managed ops are the commercial cloud.
Real-time MPP data warehouse, MySQL-compatible and Apache-governed, built to leave cloud warehouses like Snowflake. A distributed cluster to run; SSO and managed ops sit with the commercial VeloDB.
OCI-native container registry in a single static binary with RBAC, scanning and replication built in, no external database. Apache-licensed, no paid tier. A younger CNCF Sandbox project than Harbor.
Red Hat's Apache-licensed container registry with integrated Clair scanning, geo-replication and RBAC in the free core. Multi-service stack; roadmap steered by Red Hat and tied to OpenShift.
Minimal Apache-licensed OCI registry, formerly Docker Registry: stores and serves container images with pluggable S3 or filesystem storage. No built-in auth, RBAC or UI; you wrap it or run Harbor.
CNCF-graduated registry that stores, scans and signs OCI images. RBAC, replication and audit logging in the free Apache core, no paid tier. A multi-service stack, so weigh the operational weight.
High-performance web server, reverse proxy and load balancer with a permissive BSD core, proven at internet scale. Active health checks, JWT auth and dynamic config sit behind the paid Plus tier.
Web server and reverse proxy in a single Go binary that issues and renews HTTPS certificates automatically. Apache-licensed with no paid tier: every feature ships in the open build.
Reverse proxy and Kubernetes ingress that self-configures from service discovery, so routes update without restarts. MIT core, single binary. Advanced auth, WAF and multi-cluster are paid tiers.
Self-hosted AGPL Rust server reimplementing the Bitwarden API, unlocking the org policies, event logs and SSO the official tiers gate. One container. Single-maintainer, weigh the bus-factor risk.
Open source is not the opposite of paying for software. Four business models hide behind one label: foundation-run, open core, source-available, and support-funded. Buy a stack and you inherit all of them. What breaks on day two, and the four questions to ask before you sign.