Keygen ❤ OSS

Keygen and Open Source

At Keygen, we strive to support Open Source wherever we can. As consumers of, and contributors to, open source, we believe supporting open source is the right thing to do. Without open source, Keygen wouldn't exist. So in appreciation, we contribute back in various ways.

Our code

Firstly, our flagship product itself — our licensing API — contributes to the software commons via the Fair Core License (FCL). The FCL is a mostly-permissive non-compete Fair Source license that supports reading, using, modifying, and distributing for most use cases. Under the FCL, our API starts off Fair Source but eventually becomes Open Source under Apache 2.0.

In addition, our UI, Portal, is open source under Apache 2.0. This means it can be self-hosted, forked, modified, etc., and even used for other projects.

We also have other open source projects licensed under MIT, such as our Zapier integration and our CLI. Fork, modify, w/e.

Outside of that, Keygen regularly extracts portions of its code bases into open source libraries, such as:

• request_migrations
• typed_params
• union_of
• verbose_migrations
• statement_timeout
• temporary_tables
• transition_through
• null_association
• denormalizes
• machineid

All of these are also open source under MIT.

Our money

In addition to contributing code to the open source commons, we also contribute financially. We have donated tens of thousands of dollars to open source over the past 8 years, and we hope to continue to do so. We also have an Open Source tier, where we provide free artifact distribution for popular open source projects.

We are a part of OSS Pledge and FOSS Funders. (Your company should be, too.) As part of our participation in OSS Pledge in particular, we commit to financially contributing at least $2,000 a year per-developer at Keygen.

As of July 2024, we've contributed financially to the following projects:

1. github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder - since 2021, we've donated over $3,400 to @mmaietta. We donate $100/mo.
2. github.com/tauri-apps/tauri - since 2022, we've donated over $3,000 to @tauri-apps. We donate $100/mo.
3. github.com/bevyengine/bevy - since 2022, we've donated over $3,250 to @cart. We donate $100/mo to @cart, and $250/mo to @bevyengine.
4. github.com/eugeny/tabby - since 2022, we've provided free distribution and auto-upgrades for Tabby.
5. github.com/palkan/action_policy - since 2022, we've donated over $250 to @palkan. We donate $10/mo.
6. github.com/maxlap/activerecord_where_assoc - since 2023, we've donated over $80 to @MaxLap. We donate $10/mo.
7. github.com/mhenrixon/sidekiq-unique-jobs - we donated $220 to @mhenrixon between 2022-2024.
8. github.com/sindresorhus - we donated $9,120 to @sindresorhus between 2021-2022.
9. github.com/bagindo/tauri-plugin-keygen - since 2024, we've sponsored @bagindo for $100/mo.
10. github.com/ahonn/keygen-rs - since 2024, we've sponsored @ahonn for $100/mo.
11. thanks.dev - we donate $250/mo and they split our donation across our dependency tree for each project.
12. over $3,400 in private sponsorships.

Overall, this equates to monetary contributions of over $5,000/year/dev at Keygen, well over our pledge of $2,000/yr/dev. We share this to encourage other companies to give more when possible. If your company has the funds, you should consider also financially contributing to Open Source with us.

Full disclaimer — for some of these contributions, we get perks, such as a logo in the project's readme or on the project's home page, or direct help with issues. But we largely sponsor these projects because we want to see them succeed — because when they succeed, we also succeed. Some of these projects are direct dependencies of Keygen, while others are simply projects or maintainers that we love.

As we grow, we hope our contributions can grow as well.

Our thanks.dev sponsorships can be viewed here.

Our GitHub sponsorships can be viewed here.

Our Open Collective can be viewed here.

Our OSS Pledge membership can be viewed here.

Our OSS Pledge report can be viewed here.

Our time

Lastly, we contribute to open source with our time as well. Keygen's employees have contributed to projects such as Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

---

For questions or information about our Open Source values or contributions, please contact [email protected].