Open Source Acknowledgements

Expedition Edge runs on open source software. A huge amount of work by people we’ve never met makes it possible for us to publish, secure, and deliver this site.

This page is a thank you to the projects and communities that power our stack.

Core platform and services

WordPress
Our content platform and publishing engine. Thanks to the WordPress project, contributors, plugin authors, theme developers, translators, and the broader community.

PHP
WordPress runs on PHP, and so do many parts of our backend workflows. Thanks to the PHP maintainers and contributors for decades of engineering.

MariaDB
Our site data lives in MariaDB. Thanks to the MariaDB Foundation, maintainers, and the community around open database software.

Nginx
We use Nginx as part of our web serving stack. Thanks to the Nginx developers and everyone who maintains modules, documentation, and packaging.

Apache HTTP Server
Parts of our stack and tooling rely on Apache and its ecosystem. Thanks to the Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server community.

Cloudflare
We use Cloudflare for performance and security at the edge (CDN, caching, DNS, and protection features). While Cloudflare is a commercial service, it stands on top of—and contributes to—open source in many areas. We’re grateful for the open internet infrastructure ecosystem that makes modern web performance possible.

“Related” open source that typically comes along for the ride

Even if you don’t see these names in the footer, most web stacks like ours commonly depend on supporting projects such as:

• Linux and the open-source ecosystem used by most servers
• OpenSSL (or compatible TLS libraries) for secure HTTPS connections
• cURL and other networking libraries used by PHP and plugins
• Expat / libxml2 and other parsing libraries used across the stack
• Image processing libraries used for thumbnails and optimization (commonly ImageMagick, libjpeg, libpng, WebP libraries), depending on server configuration

We’re thankful for the maintainers of all these foundational tools, plus the packaging teams from various Linux distributions that make reliable deployments possible.

Plugins, themes, and bundled libraries

WordPress sites often include additional open source components via:

• WordPress core bundled libraries
• Themes
• Plugins
• Front-end libraries (JavaScript/CSS)
• Fonts and icon sets

Each of those may include its own licensing and attribution requirements. Where applicable, we keep license information with the software itself and/or in a dedicated licenses directory on the server.

Licenses and trademarks

Open source projects are licensed under their respective licenses. All trademarks, service marks, and logos (including WordPress, PHP, MariaDB, Apache, Nginx, and Cloudflare) are the property of their respective owners.

Thank you

Open source is one of the rare, shining examples of humanity cooperating at scale. Expedition Edge exists because thousands of people chose to build useful things and share them.

To everyone who writes code, reviews pull requests, maintains packages, answers forum questions, writes docs, fixes security bugs, and keeps infrastructure alive: thank you.