We built Probo from the ground up with open source software (OSS) as a top priority. Zivtech, the company that built and supports Probo, is an “OSS shop,” and our values are OSS to the core. We value open source in our own code and product as well as the OSS that the broader development community is building. We’re focused on making Probo free and easy to use for OSS developers via the Probo.ci SaaS app.

Open Source Probo

Probo itself is open source, and we’ve always worked with the assumption that the OSS version of the software should be usable and useful without having to pay Probo or Zivtech anything.

Probo has always been free to those who are willing to go through the technically challenging steps of getting the large, and often unwieldy, application to run on their own servers or local machines. But in reality, it’s never been straightforward for those curious about OSS Probo. There are numerous inherent challenges when trying to get a complex app that integrates with several other SaaS platforms to run multiple interconnected services.

That’s why we were extremely excited when Michael Bagnall, aka ElusiveMind, reached out to the Probo team to tell us about his passion for OSS Probo and to see how he could help. Since then, Michael has not only gotten Probo up and running for the federal government sites he works on, he’s also been contributing pull requests on Probo code base and documenting how he got it all working. We were so excited about Michael’s amazing work that we offered him a seat on Probo’s Board of Advisors, and we’re even more excited that he accepted!

One of Michael’s recent contributions, which he’ll write about himself soon (and sorry to steal your thunder Michael! I couldn’t contain how happy this made me), is a “containerized” version of OSS Probo, which should dramatically lower the technical overhead for getting started. Michael also created a Drupal module to handle the front-end tasks normally only found within the Probo SaaS App, which is yet another awesome contribution that we hope OSS users find useful. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll move our SaaS app to use the module. We’re big fans of Drupal and have a lot of experience with it.

If you’d like to try out OSS Probo in a docker container, you can find Michael’s work here: https://github.com/ElusiveMind/probo-docker.

Open Source on the Probo SaaS App

One other way that we’ve decided to make Probo moar awesomer for OSS developers is by making Probo free for those building open source software. If you’re building OSS and need sandbox or demonstration sites for your work, all you need to do to get a free Probo Silver plan for your open source project is:

• Sign up for an account. You should be able to sign up for a trial and you’ll have 2 months free regardless.
• Email probo-support@zivtech.com and send us the name of your organization and the nature of your OSS project.
• We will give you access.

Keep in mind that only OSS projects that are open to the public will be considered, so ensure that your repository is set to public first!

We’re excited to offer this for open source projects and we hope Probo can continue to help make OSS even better. Questions or comments? Let us know below.