Open Source at BTIT
Proudly Open Source
Open source is not simply a technology choice at BTIT. It is part of how we believe technology should work: open, interoperable, portable and supported by communities that contribute as well as consume.
Open technology has given us a lot
Much of the modern digital world has been built on software created openly, shared freely and improved collaboratively. BTIT has benefited enormously from that ecosystem.
We believe organisations that benefit from open source should also help sustain it.
That means more than downloading and using open-source software. We support open-source projects through our professional work, operate public infrastructure, make open-source applications more accessible to New Zealand organisations, and contribute engineering time and resources back into the wider community.
These are some of the ways we're giving back.
Free Community Service
Linux mirrors, hosted in New Zealand
BTIT operates a public Linux archive at linux.btit.nz, providing local access to repositories, releases and images from a growing collection of open-source operating systems and projects.
Hosting mirrors locally helps reduce unnecessary international traffic, improves download performance for New Zealand users and adds another piece of infrastructure supporting the resilience of the open-source ecosystem.
The archive includes distributions and projects such as Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Alpine Linux, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, FreeBSD and others.
Public. Free. No account required.
Free for Kiwi Business
Making open-source business software accessible
Our Free for Kiwi Business initiative gives New Zealand businesses access to useful hosted open-source business applications without traditional software licence fees.
The initiative is about making enterprise-quality open-source technology easier for Kiwi organisations to adopt.
- HR management
- CRM
- Service desk and asset management
- Project and portfolio management
- Business productivity applications
These are real open-source applications rather than cut-down proprietary products designed to lock organisations into a particular platform.
Where practical, data remains portable and the underlying applications can also be deployed independently.
Free Community Service
xip.nz
Sometimes useful infrastructure should simply be available.
xip.nz is BTIT's public IP-address-based DNS service, designed to make development, testing, homelabs and temporary environments easier.
Use an IP address as part of a hostname and xip.nz can resolve it without first having to create and maintain conventional DNS records.
No account. No subscription. Just DNS.
Open Cloud
Nextcloud, hosted here in New Zealand
We believe people and organisations should have meaningful alternatives to placing everything into a handful of global proprietary cloud platforms.
That's why we support Nextcloud, one of the world's leading open-source file sharing and collaboration platforms, as the foundation for our New Zealand-hosted online storage services.
Nextcloud delivers familiar cloud-storage capabilities while retaining the openness, portability and flexibility that come from an open-source platform.
And through Faro broadband, we're bringing connectivity, New Zealand infrastructure and open cloud services closer together.
Coming Soon
SiliconKiwi App Store
Our next step is making self-hosted open-source software dramatically easier to use.
The SiliconKiwi App Store will provide a catalogue of useful open-source applications that can be deployed onto New Zealand-hosted SiliconKiwi infrastructure without having to build everything from scratch.
- CRM and business applications
- Collaboration platforms
- Project management
- Developer tools
- Monitoring and observability
- Automation
- Databases
- Self-hosted cloud applications
The goal is simple:
Choose an application. Deploy it. Own your environment.
It combines the convenience people expect from modern cloud platforms with the freedom and portability of open-source software.
Open source is about more than free software
For us, open source is fundamentally about choice, interoperability and the freedom to control the technology your organisation depends on.
Using open source means helping sustain it
BTIT delivers commercial services around open-source technology, and we're proud to do so. Sustainable open source needs skilled engineers, professional support, reliable infrastructure and organisations willing to invest in the ecosystem around it.
But we also think some of that value should flow back out.
So we'll continue operating public infrastructure, supporting open projects, helping Kiwi organisations adopt open technology, and looking for new ways to contribute.