Every infrastructure team running open source eventually faces the same choice. When something breaks or a feature is missing, you can patch it locally and move on — or you can fix it upstream.
Local patches feel faster. They aren’t. Each one has to be carried, rebased and retested on every release, until upgrading becomes a project of its own and the deployment quietly turns into a fork nobody wants to own.
We don’t maintain private forks for our clients. We fix things where they belong.
What it means in practice
Fixes go upstream by default. When we find a bug, we report it, write the patch and take it through review in the upstream project. If you need the fix before the next release, we carry it temporarily — always with a link to the upstream change, and only until it lands.
Features are designed with the community. If you need something new, we work with the project to build it in a way that will be accepted and maintained, rather than bolting it on from the outside.
We use community tooling. Deployment, lifecycle management and CI are built on the same open tools the projects themselves use and test. No proprietary layer between you and the software.
We give back time, not just code. Code review, CI maintenance, documentation and release work keep open source healthy. We spend time on all of it, because the projects our clients depend on need it.
Why it’s good for you
- Upgrades stay routine. No patch stack to rebase means new releases are an upgrade, not a migration.
- Your fixes are maintained by the community. Once merged, a fix is tested on every change, by everyone.
- You’re never locked in. Everything we build runs on upstream software, in your repositories. You can operate it without us.
- You get influence. Working upstream gives you a voice in where the projects you depend on are heading.