Open source, and why it matters to you
Short version: The software we build on is public. Anyone can read it. That means you're not trapped with us.
What "open source" means
Software is written as text — code. Most companies keep theirs locked up. Open source means the code is published where anyone can read it, use it, and improve it.
Why you should care
You're not locked in. The usual way software companies make money is by making you dependent. Open source means the platform your business runs on is available to anyone. If you fire us tomorrow, another developer can pick it up and keep going. That's not a bug for us — it's how we think it should work.
No license fee per person. You're not paying a big vendor a monthly toll for every employee who logs in. That's a large part of why we can come in cheaper.
What we're actually doing with it
We sponsor a project called Pengin Open Source. It's not a giant developer community or a finished product — it's a training program. We use it to teach college students and people retraining out of another field how to build real, working software with Python and Django, as a genuine vocational path instead of classroom theory alone.
The project itself is the shared starting skeleton every project we build sits on top of: the page editor, the login and permissions system, the deployment setup. It's early, it's volunteer-built, and we're upfront about that.
Our commercial platform, Pengin-Pi-3, is built on those bones. It's meant to be a practical, swiss-army-knife way for a small business to deploy a website or line-of-business software that hooks into the tools you already use, for a lot less than a SaaS provider or cloud software company would charge — and to give the people training on it something real and useful to build. If you try the software yourself and outgrow the self-serve version, or want it professionally deployed and supported, Tobu Pengin gladly provides that.
You can see the code at code.penginopensource.org and read about the project at penginopensource.org.
You don't need to understand any of this to be our customer. But if you ever want to check we're telling the truth, it's all there.