Free Software

We use Free Software to work with, and as much as possible of what we produce is Free Software too.

People stop us in the street and ask us why we're doing this, and the reasons are many, varied, and variegated...

Free Software is the best choice from a technical point of view. Apart from the fact that everybody on the team worked mainly with FOSS before joining Except, Free Software libraries and tools are a better investment of our time: we know that an application developed with Free Software won't stop working the next time the library or tool is updated. The license won't expire and we won't be left without support, nor will we have forced and costly upgrades. Each piece of software contributed to the community builds on the intellectual commons, avoiding reinventing the wheel every single time.

Free Software is also the best option from a political and economic point of view; it narrows the digital divide and places a myriad of small developer shops and the largest corporations of the world on a level playground. And each contribution to the community returns knowledge that enriches the whole of humankind and not just a single corporation.

At this point, cars are honking at us because we're causing a traffic jam with our explanations, but we move aside and carry on a bit more.

We do our best to do things The Right Way, responsibly, using agile processes and open standards. There is at least one recommendation of how to do things The Right Way when building software. It's called the FairSource model. It includes things such as social and environmental responsibility, something that isn't less important just because we're a services company.

We try to do what we like as best we can, giving back a bit to the community when we can, from day one.

Free Software is the way to go!