No telemetry
No analytics library is imported. The only outbound calls are optional update checks and weather provider requests.
Open source
Open. Verifiable. Maintainable.
The entire source code is public on GitHub. Anyone can verify what the software does — and what it does not. No telemetry. No tracking pixels. No vendor lock-in.
What AGPLv3 means here
Wintertrace is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. For operators, this means three concrete things:
- You can use the software for your business, free of charge. No commercial-use clause, no per-seat licence.
- You can modify it. Any code change you ship as a service must be published under the same licence — so the project cannot be quietly forked into a proprietary cloud product.
- Your installation stays yours. Hosting Wintertrace internally for your own business does not trigger any publication obligation.
AGPLv3 is the strongest copyleft licence in widespread use. It is chosen deliberately, so that the open ecosystem stays open.
What you can verify
Open source only matters if the openness is concrete. Each item below is checkable in the codebase.
Signed updates
Updates are verified against an Ed25519 root key embedded in the application. Tampered packages are refused.
GPS data path
Location data goes phone → your server. No third-party cloud sits between the driver and your installation.
Open data format
The database uses standard MySQL/MariaDB. Export and migration to another system are possible at any time.
Audit trail
All edits to operation data are logged. The audit table is visible in the database and in the UI.
Public roadmap
What is coming, what is in preparation, and what is vision — all visible up front.
Why open source matters here
Winter service operators invest time training drivers, onboarding customers, and tuning their workflow. That investment is only sensible if the software will be around in five years — and not forced into a feature change or a price model the operator did not choose.
Open source removes the single biggest risk: that the vendor disappears or changes the rules. The code does not disappear. It can be forked, hosted elsewhere, or maintained by another contributor.
That is not idealism. It is risk reduction.
Inspect, install, contribute
Read the code, file an issue, or open a pull request. The repository is the single source of truth.
Topic page: Open source winter maintenance software
Try Wintertrace.
Upload one small file to your web hosting, open it in your browser, and the installer puts the latest signed Wintertrace core on your webspace. About ten minutes — no FTP client needed.