Open source is not free: it's free as in freedom (and why that matters more)

There's an old confusion in software: believing open source means "free of charge". English solved it with a joke: free as in beer vs free as in freedom.

For us, the distinction isn't philosophical. It's the foundation of everything.

Free is a price. Libre is a right.

When something is merely free, you're a guest. The owner can change the price tomorrow, shut down the service, sell it, shrink your plan. You've lived it: free tools that started charging, plans that got smaller, features moved to the enterprise tier.

When something is libre — truly open source — you're the owner. You can read the code, audit it, modify it, run it anywhere, forever, without asking permission. Nobody can raise your price because there is no price. Nobody can close the door on you because the door is yours.

Why open source always wins in the long run

Proprietary software degrades over time: the vendor adds features you didn't ask for to justify price hikes, and the roadmap answers to investors, not users.

Open source evolves differently. Bugs are found by thousands of eyes. Features are requested by the people who use the tool every day. If the original project goes astray, the community forks it and moves on. Linux, Postgres, Redis, nginx: the world's infrastructure already is open source. What was missing was the layer users actually touch.

Lock-in is incompatible with freedom

Look at the modern SaaS pattern: free to start, comfortable to stay, impossible to leave. Your data goes in easily and comes out as an incomplete CSV, if you're lucky.

Open source reverses the power. If our cloud fails you, you take the code and your data and run it elsewhere. That's not a threat: it's the design. Making it easy to leave is exactly what forces us to be good.

So how is it sustained?

Simple: the software is free, the cloud isn't. Running servers costs electricity and real machines. If you want us to run it for you — with login, backups and uptime — you pay exactly that: the infrastructure, at cost. No margin on the software, because the software is already yours.

Free is a promise that can be broken. Libre is a fact that can't be revoked.

That's why we say software is dead: the software you didn't own is dead.