Service · Bespoke software

Open source development

A mutual insurer in Bilbao with two hundred users renews its document management subscription every year, and every year the bill climbs. Now the vendor has announced that the installed version is losing support and the replacement exists only in its own cloud. At that point the question stops being technical: does the organisation want to rely on one company for something it uses every day? Open source lets you answer no. It does not make costs disappear; it moves them. Instead of licences you pay for development, hosting and maintenance, and the advantage grows with every extra user. We work through those sums with your figures, pick components with a real community and support behind them, and document everything so any competent team could carry on.

€0
in per-user licence fees
SBOM
list of components and versions
EUPL, GPL, MIT
each licence checked
EU
hosting in Spain or Europe

What falls within the scope of this service

What goes into an open source project with us, from choosing the building blocks to the day another team has to take the system over.

Pin down the details with one of our engineers

Five-year sums

We set the full cost of the closed product against the open alternative: licences, development, hosting, support and training. Without that figure, the choice gets made on ideology, for or against.

Well-backed building blocks

PostgreSQL, Linux, Laravel or Symfony, Django, Keycloak, Nextcloud, Metabase. We favour projects with a foundation or company behind them, several active maintainers and security fixes released on a steady cycle.

Repeatable deployment

Docker containers, continuous integration and separate staging and live environments. Rebuilding the system from scratch is one documented command, not a memory in the head of whoever set it up.

Inventory and vulnerabilities

An SBOM listing every component and version, plus automated scanning that raises a flag when a vulnerability appears. Clients subject to NIS2 or Spain's ENS increasingly ask for this document.

Licences under control

A table showing each component's licence, GPL, AGPL, EUPL, MIT or Apache 2.0, and a warning where obligations kick in depending on how you distribute or publish the system. Final legal interpretation is for your lawyer.

Fixes sent upstream

When we repair a fault in a component, the fix goes back to its community. Maintaining your own modified fork gets expensive at every upgrade.

How the engagement unfolds, one stage at a time

Build time is much like any other development. The difference shows up later, as users multiply and there are no licences to renew.

01

Comparison

Open alternatives for your case, with clear strengths and gaps. If none reaches the level you need, we will say so.

02

Limited pilot

One area or department runs the system for a few weeks before it spreads across the organisation.

03

Rollout

Building whatever is missing, migrating data, connecting to Entra ID or your directory and training people over video.

04

Handover

Code, SBOM, licence table, plus install and upgrade guides written for a team that has never seen the project.

Check who maintains a project, not just what it does. A brilliant component that depends on one person can stop receiving updates any day, and an unpatched vulnerability at the core of your system is a serious problem. Before choosing, we look at how many people commit changes, how often releases come out and how quickly security bugs get fixed.

Common questions

Because it is often a cut-down version designed to nudge you towards the paid tier, and the vendor can change the terms whenever it likes. A genuine open source project, with a recognised licence and a community, lets you use it, modify it and buy support from whoever you choose.

Apply, under a maintenance agreement that sets response times, scope and the channel for logging issues. And should you switch supplier one day, any team familiar with the technology can pick up where we left off, because the code and documentation are yours.

Yes. Spain's Law 40/2015 expects administrations to reuse applications and share them through the Technology Transfer Centre, and the National Interoperability Framework favours open formats. Tender specifications are drafted by the contracting body; we can help describe the technical side.

Not because it is open. Large projects have many people reviewing and fixing code, and advisories are public. What makes the difference is patching on time: we follow each project's bulletins and alerts from INCIBE-CERT and CCN-CERT, and critical flaws are fixed without waiting for the next planned release.

Very common, and manageable. Plenty of open source components plug into Microsoft 365 and Entra ID, and video training covers everyday use. For end users the change is usually smaller than expected; for the IT team we leave step-by-step guides.

Let's explore the open option

Tell us which product you use now, how many users it has and what worries you about it. We will outline the open alternatives and where they would fall short.

Hours
Monday to Friday, 9:00-18:00 Spanish time (CET), answers within a working day
Meetings
Video calls via Google Meet or Teams

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