Free Your Tech!

We are live!

()··Balint B. Kovari
Table of Contents

We found our domain name on Thursday - freeyourtech.org was available! An instant purchase through Namesilo, followed by setting up our email with Purelymail. With these basics in place, we're ready to start.

Friday was all about making it official: registering with Virk as a frivillig forening (voluntary association), writing our statutes, and getting all the paperwork done. Digital Post signup - check!

Online Presence

Saturday brought us to Codeberg, where we set up our website using Zola, a static site generator written in Rust. Static sites are perfect for Codeberg hosting - no server needed.

Markdown makes writing content easy, and Zola's themes help keep things simple. Woodpecker CI on Codeberg's infrastructure handles automatic deployments when we merge to main.

Our tech stack - Zola, Forgejo, Git, and Woodpecker CI - is all free and open source. Codeberg is a non-profit focused on supporting projects like ours. We're in good hands.

With everything configured - Codeberg pages, CI, DNS - Freeyourtech.org is now live. And yes, we made a LinkedIn page too (oh, the irony).

Finances

Next up: finances. We're setting up with Wise for an international bank account and Open Collective to handle membership payments, donations and expenses transparently. To make recurring membership payments managable we need to process card payments, so we also signed up for a Stripe account.

I explored several FOSS accounting solutions, including Frappe Books, but Open Collective's built-in financial tools might be all we need for now.

Work Ahead

With the basics in place, we can focus on what matters: sharing knowledge and building infrastructure. I'm excited to share what I've learned about Linux, GrapheneOS, FOSS apps, and federated social networks. For infrastructure, we'll start with Authelia for SSO, followed by Nextcloud and Collabora to provide community cloud storage and office tools.

Remarks

We are not the first ones down this path and we're glad to follow in the footsteps of many other great projects. We also deeply appreciate everyone who contributed to the free software and infrastructure we use. Today we're joining the good work. Here's a short list of websites with useful info on this topic:

And here's a short list of service providers who are doing something similar to us:

  • data.coop is a Copenhagen based local coop offering services for members, chargin a membership fee. They run everything on their own hardware, which is quite impressive.
  • AdminForge is a German IT provider hosting a LOT of open-source services for free.
  • Commons Cloud is a spanish cooperative hosting a few services for a fee.

While these websites and organisations are helpful and instpirational, we don't necessarily agree with everything they do or trust them fully, so use your own judgement if you consider using them.

A note on our startup process: yes, we're using some proprietary services from businesses and governments. We use ethical, accessible services where they make sense or where we must, while working to provide alternatives where needed. These providers have proven themselves over years. For everything else, we'll build better solutions together. You can sign up to be a member here →.