About sysmocom background and company culture

sysmocom and Osmocom

The Osmocom project is a non-for-profit, community-driven project creating various FOSS projects related to mobile communications. The most popular/well-known Osmocom project is Osmocom Cellular Network Infrastructure.

Osmocom was founded by Harald Welte, who subsequently co-founded sysmocom as a commercial company providing products, support and services not only related to Osmocom projects.

We are proud to keep a strict separation between the Osmocom community project and the sysmocom commercial venture. Despite sysmocom funding Osmocom in various ways (server hosting, developer conferences, code contributions) there are no advertisements related to sysmocom on the community web pages. We understand FOSS and we are not abusing it for marketing.

We work upstream

sysmocom works upstream. We do not have internal forks/branches of the various FOSS programs we use. Rather, we work directly in the various upstream projects, such as OpenBSC, OsmoBTS, OsmoPCU and many others. This means that

• our bugfixes are immediately committed/contributed upstream

• FOSS that you receive from sysmocom is not different from the source code you can see in the public / upstream repositories.

• you can rebuild (modified or unmodified) upstream source code and use it on or with sysmocom products.

No Open Core

Contrary to other companies, we do not believe in an "Open Core" business model, where a feature-crippled or outdated version of the software is made available as a teaser only to lure customers into obtaining a paid license for a proprietary (sometimes called "commercial") version of the software.

No Dual Licensing

We believe in strong copyleft licenses and the collaborative development model that they require. We thus use the GNU Affero General Public License because we believe in it, and not because we see it as a tool to sell expensive proprietary alternative licenses to the software.