RIDING BYTES

Project update - June 2026

SENAITE Starter is now open source

The SENAITE Starter add-on, previously sold through our shop, is now free software. The repository has been contributed to the SENAITE GitHub organization, under the same GPL-2.0 license as the rest of the project. Free for everyone, with public commit history and community-driven maintenance.

GPL-2.0 - now part of the
SENAITE PROJECT

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01 / What it is A complete starter project for SENAITE

SENAITE Starter is the full bootstrap we use at RIDING BYTES when we set up a new SENAITE deployment. Not just a code template — the whole starting point:

  • Production buildout. A working buildout.cfg for a Python 2.7 SENAITE 2.x instance, with the version pins and dependency layout the Core Developers use in production.
  • Development buildout. A separate development.cfg that pulls SENAITE core and its add-ons in from Git source — for upgrade testing against the latest commits before you roll forward.
  • The senaite.starter add-on. An installable, namespaced add-on registered in SENAITE's controlpanel, ready to receive your lab's custom sample types, analysis services, calculation hooks, and report templates.
  • Test layer. Wired up so bin/test works the moment buildout finishes — with a Plone testing fixture and a SENAITE simple-testing layer included.
  • Documentation skeleton. An mkdocs site pre-configured with the Material theme, ready to host your install and customisation notes.

Source on GitHub: senaite/senaite.starter.

02 / Previous customers What this means for you

If you previously bought SENAITE Starter through our shop:

  • Your install keeps working. No action required. The code you have today is the same code now published under GPL-2.0.
  • Your support contract is unchanged. Any maintenance, customisation, or SENAITE Care arrangement we have with you continues exactly as before.
  • You can move to the upstream branch whenever you want. Public releases under senaite/senaite.starter are now the canonical source. We can help you migrate the version pin in your buildout if you'd like.

Questions about your specific installation? Get in touch — reference your previous order and we'll take care of it.

03 / Why we did this Closing the gap between us and the project

SENAITE Starter began as paid scaffolding for laboratories getting started with SENAITE. Over time, the case for keeping it behind a paywall got weaker:

  • It's project scaffolding, not a product. Most of the value is in the conventions, not in proprietary code. The community benefits more from shared conventions than from a one-vendor template.
  • Open source aligns with our Core Developer mission. RIDING BYTES is one of two founding Core Developer organisations on SENAITE. Tooling around the project belongs in the project, not next to it.
  • Public maintenance is healthier. Issues, pull requests, and reviews from the broader SENAITE community will improve the starter faster than we can on our own.

Related

Platform
SENAITE LIMS

The open-source LIMS this add-on extends.
Product
Enterprise VM

Production-ready SENAITE VM with the Starter add-on preinstalled.
Service
SENAITE Care

Managed monitoring, maintenance, and support for SENAITE installations.

Need help migrating?

If you bought SENAITE Starter from our shop and want to move to the upstream open-source version, we'll help you switch the version pin in your buildout and run the regression checks. Existing support customers: no charge.

Contact us View on GitHub

Imprint

Responsible for the content

RIDING BYTES GmbH
Würzburger Straße 81
90766 Fürth
Germany

Tel.: +49 911 974 930 90
Email: rb@ridingbytes.com
Web: https://www.ridingbytes.com

Management

Ramon Bartl, Dipl.-Inform. (FH), MBA
Geschäftsleitung | Managing Director

Commercial register

RegistergerichtAmtsgericht Fürth
RegisternummerHRB 17318
USt-IdDE301668607

EU dispute resolution

The European Commission provides an online dispute-resolution platform at https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are not obliged and not willing to participate in dispute-resolution proceedings before a consumer-arbitration body.

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-06-04.

This is a plain static website. It runs no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, no third-party tracking, no session cookies, and no remarketing. The only personal data we ever receive from this site is what you voluntarily type into our contact form.

Data controller

RIDING BYTES GmbH, Würzburger Straße 81, 90766 Fürth, Germany. Managing Director: Ramon Bartl. Contact: rb@ridingbytes.com, +49 911 974 930 90. Full details in the imprint.

What we collect

When you submit the contact form on /contact/, we receive:

That is the entire set. We do not collect your IP address, browser type, referrer, location, or any other metadata about your visit.

We process the data you submit to answer your enquiry. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (steps prior to entering a contract at your request) and, where the message is unrelated to a contract, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in answering business correspondence).

How long we keep it

Contact-form messages live in our business inbox like any other business email. We retain them as long as the conversation may plausibly require a follow-up, and at most for the German tax / commercial-law retention periods for business correspondence (typically 6 to 10 years under §§ 257 HGB, 147 AO when the message forms part of a contractual relationship). When neither applies, we delete on request.

Processors

The contact form is delivered via Formspree (Formspree Inc., 2261 Market Street #4067, San Francisco, CA 94114, USA), which receives the form contents from your browser and forwards them to our inbox. A Data Processing Agreement is in place. Formspree’s privacy policy: https://formspree.io/legal/privacy-policy/

The website is hosted in the EU on infrastructure operated by Hostinger (Hostinger International Ltd.). Hostinger only sees the traffic required to serve the static files; we do not keep logs that identify individual visitors.

What we do not do

Webfont

We load the Nunito Sans webfont from Google Fonts. Google receives your IP address when the font is loaded. If you’d rather avoid that, any browser extension that blocks third-party requests (uBlock Origin, NoScript, etc.) prevents it; the site renders fine with a system fallback font.

Map on the contact page

The contact page embeds a map tile served by OpenStreetMap Foundation (St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WS, United Kingdom). When the page loads, your browser fetches the map tiles directly from openstreetmap.org. The foundation receives your IP address in the standard web-server log. No cookies are set, no tracking pixels are loaded.

Embedded YouTube videos

A few blog posts include a YouTube video. We do not load the video automatically. You see a static preview image hosted on our own server, and the YouTube player only loads after you click the play button.

When you click play, your browser connects to YouTube (Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland, and Google LLC, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA). Google receives your IP address, the URL you came from, and may set cookies. We use the privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain, which suppresses tracking cookies until you interact with the player, but the IP transfer cannot be avoided.

You can revoke consent at any time by reloading the page; no YouTube connection will be made again until you click play.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

To exercise any of these rights, email rb@ridingbytes.com. We respond within one month, free of charge.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy materially, we update the “Last updated” date at the top. Past versions are not archived publicly; ask if you need one.

Terms of Use

Last updated: 2026-06-04.

These Terms of Use (“Terms”) apply to your access of, and use of, the ridingbytes.com website. Services purchased separately (consulting, development, training, hosting, SENAITE Care, SENAITY) are governed by individual written contracts, not by these Terms.

1. Operator

RIDING BYTES GmbH, Würzburger Straße 81, 90766 Fürth, Germany. Managing Director: Ramon Bartl. Contact: rb@ridingbytes.com, +49 911 974 930 90. Registergericht Amtsgericht Fürth, HRB 17318. USt-Id DE301668607.

2. Scope

This website is informational. It describes our services, our work on the open-source SENAITE LIMS project, and provides a contact form. No sales, contracts, or payment transactions occur through this website. Engagements are entered into via separate written agreement.

3. Use of the website

You agree to use this website only for lawful purposes. You must not:

4. SENAITE LIMS

References to SENAITE LIMS on this site point to the upstream open-source project at https://github.com/senaite, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2). Nothing on this site grants you a licence beyond what GPLv2 already provides. Our own contributions to SENAITE are released under the same licence.

5. Intellectual property

The text and visual design of this website, the brand mark, and the logo are property of RIDING BYTES GmbH. The four lab background clips used in the hero are property of their respective owners and used under our licence. Do not reproduce or redistribute the contents of this site without prior written permission.

The Nunito Sans webfont (loaded from Google Fonts) is licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

The site may link to third-party websites (GitHub, SENAITE, senaity.com, partner pages). We are not responsible for the content, privacy practices, or availability of any third-party site.

7. No warranty

The website is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, express or implied. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of viruses or other harmful components. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.

8. Limitation of liability

We are liable for intent and gross negligence without limitation. For slight negligence, we are liable only for the breach of a material contractual obligation (Kardinalpflicht), and only for foreseeable, typical contractual damages. The limitations above do not apply to claims arising from death, personal injury, or mandatory provisions of the German Product Liability Act.

9. Data protection

How we handle data submitted through the contact form is described in the Privacy Policy. We do not set cookies — see the Cookie Policy for details.

10. Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the conflict-of-laws rules and the UN Convention on the International Sale of Goods (CISG). Place of jurisdiction for disputes arising from or in connection with these Terms is Fürth, Germany, unless mandatory consumer-protection law provides otherwise.

11. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is held to be unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full effect.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be reflected in the “Last updated” date at the top. Continued use of the website after a change constitutes acceptance.

Contact

Questions about these Terms: rb@ridingbytes.com.

Cookie Policy

Last updated: 2026-06-04.

We do not set cookies

This website does not set any cookies. No session cookies, no analytics cookies, no preference cookies, no third-party cookies, no consent banner required.

We do use one localStorage entry

We store a single value in your browser’s local storage:

KeyValuePurpose
rb-theme"light" or "dark"Remembers your light/dark theme choice between visits.
rb-lang-pref"auto" or "user"Remembers whether we already auto-detected your language preference, or whether you picked a language yourself. Prevents us from overriding your choice.

localStorage is not a cookie. It is per-origin, not transmitted in HTTP requests, and we cannot read it server-side. You can clear it at any time in your browser’s developer tools or site-data settings.

We do not use these things either

Third-party requests

Three third-party requests can happen, only one of them automatically:

  1. Google Fonts delivers the Nunito Sans webfont. Google receives your IP address as part of the HTTP request. We do not send Google any additional information. No cookie set.
  2. Formspree receives the contact form contents only after you explicitly submit the form. No cookie set.
  3. OpenStreetMap delivers the map tile on the contact page. OpenStreetMap receives your IP address as part of the HTTP request. No cookie is set. See the privacy policy for the full details.
  4. YouTube is not loaded automatically. Blog posts that include a video show a locally hosted preview image. The YouTube player and any YouTube cookies are only loaded after you click the play button. See the privacy policy for the full details.

Questions

Email rb@ridingbytes.com. We respond within one month.