Support & Care

Support & Care is a program for the sustainable further development, stabilization and support of open source software (OSS). Open Elements works with both the industry and the open source community to ensure the quality, independence and development of critical open source projects and components.

Why open source is so important for our lives today

Open source ensures the quality, security and progressiveness of software, fosters community and provides economic and social benefits. Open source offers these benefits to individuals, companies and society as a whole. It is therefore in everyone’s interest to support OSS projects financially. Due to the wealth of benefits, we want to focus on 4 important aspects here:

• Knowledge sharing and education: open source projects are often not only software solutions, but also educational resources. Interested parties can study the code, learn from it and further their education. In this way, open source promotes knowledge sharing and enables many people to acquire and deepen their technical skills.
• Trust through transparency: As the source code of OSS is publicly accessible, anyone can check it. This creates a high level of trust, as any defects or hidden functions are visible.
• Independence from individual providers: OSS reduces dependence on individual software providers and their business models. This is particularly important in critical infrastructures to ensure that applications and systems can continue to be operated in the future.
• Social justice: Open source software is often accessible to everyone, regardless of financial means. OSS projects enable people from all social and economic backgrounds to have access to technology and education.

Importance of open source support

In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of open source projects, it is crucial to support them financially. Many developers and maintainers work on these projects voluntarily, often without financial compensation. Through open source support, these projects can be continuously developed and improved. In addition, open source support allows developers to focus more on the quality and security of the software and respond more quickly to security vulnerabilities or bugs. Support also incentivizes new developers to get involved and develop innovative solutions. In short, financial support helps keep the open source community vibrant and productive, which ultimately benefits everyone.

Active participation in open source projects allows companies to gain valuable insights and technological advancements, which promotes long-term success and competitiveness while strengthening the open source community.

How Support & Care promotes open source software

With Support & Care, Open Elements has launched a program to promote open source in a fair and lightweight way. Support & Care helps both the open source projects and the people behind these projects. We focus our support on projects in the Java programming language. This specialization makes sense because it allows us to apply our in-depth expertise in a specific programming language. This allows us to provide more efficient and higher quality support for the specific requirements and challenges that arise in critical Java-based open source projects.

Critical OSS refers to projects that are included as dependencies in a variety of critical systems and applications in industries such as banking, healthcare and politics. One example of this is the Java distribution Eclipse Temurin, which is the most widely used Java runtime environment with over 500,000 downloads, or Apache Maven, whose main components were downloaded around 2 billion times last year.

With Support & Care, Open Elements offers a solution for both projects so that the products can be used without hesitation in a professional environment. For example, Open Elements is a member of the working group behind Eclipse Temurin - our CEO Hendrik Ebbers was even a founding member - and has the head of Maven development (Chair of the Project Management Committee) under contract.

Our open source strategy aims to improve the direction of the projects through financial support and active collaboration and to prevent underfunding, poor maintenance and security of this critical OSS. By applying this strategy in a targeted manner, we can make groundbreaking improvements to the projects included in the Support & Care program and ensure that developers are able to continue their important work without financial setbacks. Because even though open source is a growing market, without financial reserves its developers may be forced to reduce or stop their work on the projects.

Why Open Elements is the right partner to support OSS

Theaim of Support & Care is to provide holistic promotion and support of OSS instead of “just” financial donations or collaboration. Our years of experience in open source development have shown us the crucial importance of this support. For this reason, Open Elements was founded as a company that views and promotes OSS from technical as well as business and organizational perspectives.

Through Open Elements’ involvement in committees such as the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group, we have experience with large or critical open source projects and are familiar with their problems and challenges. This knowledge is underlined by the membership of our managing director on the supervisory board of the Eclipse Foundation. However, due to our company structure, we are so dynamic that we can also easily work with small open source projects and support them e.g. via Github sponsorship, help newcomers or actively contribute to the source code of the projects.

All these points make Open Elements a perfect link between open source and business.

How Support & Care can help your company

Theprovision of support models for open source software has become a popular business model. Unlike many companies, however, Support & Care does not simply offer support for its own open source products. We are explicitly looking for OSS that is increasingly used in the enterprise sector, where it is often classified as security-critical. Together with the developers behind these open source projects, the Support & Care program creates a link to both support the projects and explicitly respond to the wishes and needs of Support & Care customers.

This involves not only the transparent processing of technical tickets by the respective project experts, but also the preparation and transformation of knowledge. Support & Care customers receive notifications about important security updates, fixes and releases and are invited to regular workshops and information events. This allows OSS users to contribute their own needs and interests to the projects in the shortest possible time. Through these measures, Open Elements actively promotes the principle of community building for the respective projects: Communities consisting of developers, users and other stakeholders can work together to drive innovation forward.

What services does Open Source Support include?

The Open Source Support & Care service offers comprehensive services to ensure the performance and security of your applications. Our services go beyond classic troubleshooting and promote the sustainable improvement of your infrastructure. The support contract can be customized according to your needs, socontact us for an individual consultation and find out more about how our Open Source Support & Care service can improve your IT infrastructure.

• Updates on open source projects: Receive regular reports and detailed information on major releases, bug fix releases and new projects, including security updates and Critical Patch Updates (CPU).
• Webinars & Meetings: Quarterly webinars and 1-on-1 calls provide you with prepared information and the opportunity to ask questions and contribute needs directly to the projects.
• Direct support: Customers have access to multilingual support at all times with guaranteed response times and the option of video calls for quick problem resolution.
• Support areas: Our service covers various open source projects, for example as part of our Temurin Support & Care offering and our Maven Support & Care offering. We take care of ticket creation, maintenance and monitoring in order to solve technical problems efficiently.
• Maintenance service: Our service includes the maintenance of customer-specific Docker containers, which contain all the necessary components for your application and are updated regularly. The containers are deployed in a Docker registry and tested automatically.

The support contract can be customized according to your needs.

Contact us for an individual consultation and find out more, how our Open Source Support & Care service can improve your IT infrastructure.