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For a few years, SENAITE Starter lived in our shop as a paid add-on. It was the package we used internally to give a fresh SENAITE install a clean home for the things every lab eventually customises: sample types, analysis services, calculation hooks, report templates, buildout glue. We packaged it, priced it, and sold it to labs who wanted a head start.
Today we changed our minds.
What changed
senaite.starter is now open source under GPL-2.0 — the same
license as the rest of the SENAITE project — and the repository
has been contributed to the SENAITE GitHub organization.
No paywall, public commit history, community-driven maintenance.
The full announcement and migration notes live on the canonical page: SENAITE Starter is now open source.
Why
The honest reason: it shouldn’t have been behind a paywall in the first place.
SENAITE Starter is project scaffolding. The value isn’t in proprietary code — it’s in the conventions: where to put a custom analysis service, how to wire a report template, how to structure a buildout so the next person who touches it can find their way around. Conventions belong to the community that uses them. Keeping them in a private repo behind a checkout flow was never going to produce the best version of the scaffolding, because the people who would improve it fastest — other SENAITE developers — couldn’t see it.
A second reason, more about us than the code: RIDING BYTES is one of two founding Core Developer organisations on the SENAITE project. We’ve been saying for years that our value is the work we do in public, on the upstream codebase. Selling a private add-on that wraps that same upstream codebase quietly contradicted that story. Open-sourcing it closes the gap.
The third reason is practical: open development is healthier
development. Issues, pull requests, and reviews from the wider
community will improve senaite.starter faster than we can on
our own. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly on
senaite.astm,
senaite.lims, and
every other SENAITE repo we’ve worked on. The pattern is reliable.
What it means for previous customers
If you bought SENAITE Starter from our shop:
- Your install keeps working. No action required. The code you have is the same code that’s now public.
- Your support contract is unchanged. Anything we run for you — SENAITE Care, custom development, hosting — continues as before.
- You can switch to the upstream branch whenever you want. Future releases will be published there. We’ll help you update the version pin in your buildout and run the regression checks. If you’re already a support customer, no charge.
Details on the announcement page.
What we hope happens next
A few specific things:
- Other shops adopt the same conventions. The biggest payoff
for the SENAITE community isn’t
senaite.starteritself — it’s the conventions it encodes becoming the default starting point for new add-ons across the ecosystem. If your shop has a better way to structure something, send a pull request. - Fewer paywalls around SENAITE tooling. Not just from us — across the ecosystem. If a vendor’s add-on is mostly project scaffolding, the community will be better served by it being open source.
Try it
Clone the repository, run buildout, and you have a working SENAITE instance to customise:
git clone https://github.com/senaite/senaite.starter.git
cd senaite.starter
buildout -c buildout.cfg
bin/instance fgQuestions, migration help, or just a hello — get in touch.