We host other people's work, and we say so.
The Node catalogue is more than thirty open source and source-available applications. We did not write any of them. Nextcloud, ERPNext, Zammad, Home Assistant and the rest exist because their communities and maintainers built them, and our business exists because that software is good enough to replace the SaaS subscriptions it competes with. That makes our relationship with these projects a foundation of the company, not a footnote, so we think it deserves a page that states the position plainly.
What we run, and how
We host, configure, secure, back up and support upstream software. We are not the publisher, we do not fork, and we do not white-label. Concretely:
- Stock releases, pinned versions. We run the upstream project's own published releases, unmodified, at versions we pin and review. What we run is what they shipped.
- Provenance on every product page. Each application page carries a provenance block naming the upstream project, its licence (with a link to the licence text) and the exact source we run. It is generated from our licence register, the same file our deployment pipeline is checked against, so the public claim and the running software cannot quietly diverge.
- Source offers honoured. Around a third of the catalogue is AGPL-licensed. Because we run unmodified releases, the corresponding source is the upstream repository, and the provenance block links to it as our formal offer under section 13.
- Their name, not ours. We describe products as "Hosting for X", we do not use vendors' logos, and we follow each project's published trademark policy. The software's identity belongs to the people who made it.
Licences are the deal, so we read them
Open source is not a free-for-all; each licence is the terms on which a project shares its work, and a hosting company is exactly the kind of business those terms exist to constrain. We audit every product in the catalogue against our hosting model, at the specific version we run, and we record the verdict per product.
Where a licence clearly does not permit hosting for payment, we do not sell it: we have withdrawn products from our self-serve catalogue on exactly these grounds. Where the position is conditional or genuinely arguable, we go to the vendor for a commercial arrangement or written confirmation rather than assuming the answer, and we change or withdraw the offer if the answer is no. Self-hostable and resellable are different things, and we will not blur them in our marketing.
What we do not do yet
Honesty cuts both ways, so: we do not currently sponsor the projects we make money from, and we are not significant code contributors to them. Our engagement today is operational. We run their software carefully in production, follow their advisories, comply with their licences at a level of diligence most hosts skip, and point readers and traffic at their repositories rather than wrapping their work in our brand.
We think businesses like ours should put something material back, and we are working out what that looks like for a company of our size: which projects, in what proportion, and whether money or engineering time is worth more to each. We would rather publish nothing than publish an aspiration, so this section will change only when there is something real to put in it.
If we host your project
We want a working relationship with the projects our business depends on. If you maintain something in our catalogue:
- Licensing: if you believe our hosting of your project oversteps your licence or trademark policy, tell us and we will fix it or withdraw the product. We would rather lose a catalogue entry than host against a maintainer's terms.
- Technical: we are happy to share how we run your software in production (deployment, SSO integration, backup and upgrade behaviour) if that is useful to you.
- Contact: use the form below, or email us directly. You will get an engineer, not a ticket queue.
Frequently asked questions
Is Node the publisher of the software it hosts?
No. Every application in our catalogue is built and maintained by an upstream open source project or vendor. Node hosts, configures, secures, backs up and supports that software for you. The provenance block on each product page names the upstream project, its licence and a link to the source.
Can I get the source code for the software Node runs for me?
Yes. We run stock upstream releases, unmodified, at pinned versions. Each product page links to the exact upstream source; for AGPL-licensed applications that link is also our formal source offer under section 13 of the licence.
Does every open source licence allow paid hosting?
No, and we treat that seriously. We audit the licence of every product against our hosting model, at the exact version we run, before we sell it. Where a licence does not permit hosting for payment, we do not offer that software self-serve, whatever competitors do.
Does Node sponsor the projects it hosts?
Not yet, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise. What we do today is comply carefully, credit the projects, and send readers to the upstream source from every product page. If and when we make financial or code commitments, they will be listed on this page.
Maintain a project we host?
If we host your project and you want to talk to us, about anything from licensing to how we have configured it, write to us and an engineer will reply directly.