About
Why this organization exists, and what keeps it from turning into the thing it was started against.
What it was started against
More and more of the software people depend on is no longer theirs. It used to be bought once and kept. Now it is rented by the month, it runs on someone else's servers, it needs an account to open, and its source is a trade secret. A small number of companies own the tools everyone else works with, and they decide what those tools do, what they cost next year, and when they stop.
That is a bad position for anyone who uses software, and it gets worse every year it is accepted. When a vendor changes its terms, raises its price or shuts a product down, the people who built their work on it have nowhere to go, because they were never given anything they could keep.
The answer is
What it makes should not depend on Trebired lasting.
The keyhole is the mark of the Open Source Initiative, which maintains the Open Source Definition and approves the licences that meet it. Everything here is published under MIT or the AGPL, both approved by it.
Complaining about it changes nothing. The only answer that holds is working software that anyone can read, run, change and keep, with no account and no permission. So the organization builds that, and publishes every line of it: products under the AGPL, packages under MIT or the AGPL, in public repositories from the day they exist.
The point is not that Trebired should last. It is that what it makes should not depend on Trebired lasting. Code that is published is already on other people's disks, and no change of heart, sale or shutdown can take it back.
Where the money comes from
comes from client work, and partly from donations
Publishing everything does not pay for machines or for time, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The organization is paid in two ways: client work, meaning websites, rebuilds, applications and identities, each at a price published before anyone asks, and donations from people who want the work to continue. A client website costs at most €240.
It is never paid in a way that would pull it back toward what it was started against. There are no investors waiting for an exit, no advertising, no data for sale, no closed edition and no subscription to code that is already public. Nothing about how the organization earns money depends on keeping anyone locked in, which is the only way to be sure it never tries.
Read the philosophy
Why everything is public, which machines we build for, what we write in, what software is allowed to cost, and why we make our own tools.