Maple OpenTech
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Research & development

A small shop, tackling big problems

Maple Open Tech is a small Canadian team working on problems usually left to much larger companies: a Linux distribution, long-range wireless networks, WordPress search at hosting scale, a family of cross-platform apps, and the licence they all ship under.

What we develop About us

  • Our own products, our own IP
  • Built on well-chosen open source
  • Developed in Canada
Research & Development

What we develop, and what we build on

Maple Open Tech develops its own software products and keeps and controls the intellectual property in them. Where an existing open-source project already does a job well, we build on it, choosing components whose licences fit and crediting them. Below, product by product, is which part is which.

MaplePress: WordPress search at scale

Scalable WordPress infrastructure. WordPress search runs on MySQL queries built for small lookups; MaplePress gives search its own engine, so hosts carry more sites on the same servers.
  • We develop the Go service that runs search for many WordPress sites at once, and keeps each site’s queries apart from the others'
  • We develop the MaplePress WordPress plugin and its console
  • We build on WordPress, Meilisearch for search, and Cassandra for distributed storage, each under its own licence

MaplePress

Maple Linux: a Canadian-maintained platform

A Linux desktop maintained in Canada. Rather than build a distribution from scratch, Maple Linux Core remasters Debian and adds its own work as proper Debian packages, which keeps it small enough for a small team to maintain well.
  • We develop Maple Linux Core: its own Debian packages for the desktop’s settings and branding, and the build that remasters Debian’s live image
  • We develop the Canadian defaults: English and Canadian French ready out of the box, and CIRA’s Canadian Shield DNS in live sessions
  • We develop and host the Maple APT repository that delivers updates
  • We build on Debian 13, the Cinnamon desktop, the Calamares installer, LibreWolf and LibreOffice

Maple Linux

Maple Wireless: resilient long-range networks

Long-range, resilient communications, and the tools to manage them. The radio protocols are open standards; the development work and the platform that runs a fleet of devices are ours.
  • We develop Maple Wireless Cloud: device and fleet management, firmware distribution, message routing, and its API and admin console
  • We develop custom sensor nodes, gateways and enclosures, and the embedded firmware that runs on them
  • We develop the coverage models that plan a network before any hardware is bought
  • We build on MeshCore, an open and public mesh protocol, and the LoRa and LoRaWAN standards

Maple Wireless

Maple Apps: cross-platform application technology

Five desktop apps and eight games, each written once and shipped to several platforms. Most of the work is the shared technology underneath them, which every new app inherits.
  • We develop a shared Swift framework that runs one interface natively on macOS, Linux and Windows
  • We develop MapleVectorIO, our own library for reading and writing SVG, PDF, Illustrator and EPS files, written clean-room
  • We develop the apps themselves (Maple Rewind, Notes, Markdown, Vector and Impress) and a shared kit for our games
  • We build on React for interfaces, each platform’s own web view, the Godot engine for the games, and Typst for Maple Impress’s typesetting

Maple Apps

The MOTL: how we commercialize what we make

The Maple Open Tech License is our own licensing framework, written so the source can be open to read while the products stay commercially sustainable.

  • Source-available

    Anyone can read and audit the code.

  • Free to learn from

    Free for personal, academic, research and evaluation use, and for non-profits.

  • Fully open after four years

    A commercial licence covers business use for the first four years after each release; then it is fully open.

  • Ethical-use terms

    Terms on how the software may be used that stay in force for good.

Let’s build something together

Partnerships, research collaborations, or a problem worth solving: tell us about it, and a person at Maple Open Tech will come back to you.

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