All Your Licensing Are Belong to Us^W You
keygen.sh
keygen.sh
I'm not a customer of yours, but your blog posts inspired me a lot. Your journey through quitting caffeine is a great and heartening read.
I've got two things to say;
1) Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too? Some enterprises could use it for easy management/support for customer's licenses. Although now that I think about it, it could also discourage custom, more suitable implementations for each use-case... I'm torn on this one. I would like to see it available on GitHub just out of curiosity too. It's very beautiful.
2) For a team + customers' chat, I cannot recommend Zulip enough. It's a joy to use and has the most innovative chat system I've ever seen. https://zulip.com
I hope your business keeps prospering!
I will. But I actually want to completely rebuild the portal app so that it’s easier to maintain. I (and everybody else) also want more customer-facing features, e.g. license management and offline activation, as well as white-label capabilities.
Right now, the dashboard is a pretty dated Ember app that I threw together in a couple weeks about 6 years ago. It’s hard to maintain, but does its job (mostly). I’ve been planning to completely start from scratch with React, but open sourcing the API and rebranding has been my main priority.
The new portal app will be open source too, likely under a more permissible MIT license.
For that reason, Keygen shocked me when it first came out as a public(!) licensing platform... how could they get away with documenting their secret sauce?
Cheers to you ezekg, and may transparent licensing schemes prevail.
Edit: I'm a happy user ;-)
As somebody who typically dislikes the Elastic license, this is really a great use of it:
- it used to be completely closed source, so it's not taking any previous contributions and putting a more restrictive license on it;
- there is clearly quite a bit of thought in choosing this license over something like AGPL (complete with somebody taking to themselves on GitHub), and the license was chosen based on the goals;
- the software in question is really not that useful for non-commercial uses anyway, so people who want to freeload doesn't have that much to stand on
Even though I'm not a user (and don't see myself using it in the future), I'd nevertheless be happy for them and hope they do well :)
"After 7 years of being closed source, I'm incredibly excited to announce that Keygen is now open source! Let's unpack what that means for us and for you."
Open source doesn't mean Free Software.
Outside of the announcement and 2/3 of the blog post, I use the phrase “open, source-available.”
At the time, Keygen didn’t do everything I needed (but it probably does now), so I’m not a user. However, I’ve always looked at Keygen and its solo dev with great respect. I just knew that we were going to be successful in our niches and although we haven’t helped each other with direct product offerings, just know that Keygen made me feel like I could do anything.
Because we are talking license servers … My license server is node+mongo and vends licenses as JWT. My desktop app verifies the JWT and uses the payload to unlock features. They work offline. Pretty slick! I’m proud of what we’ve built. Truly standing on the shoulders of giants.
Best of luck on your open sourcing of Keygen! Let me know if you’re ever in the Midwest USA and we can grab a meal or beverage together.
Incredibly humbled to hear that. Sometimes it's quiet and lonely as a solo founder, and this comment brought me joy. So thanks for sharing.
Today is a big change, but I'm excited (even if my hands have been shaking all day).
The real "trick" is keeping the app inexpensive and the purchase low friction. If I raised prices there'd be more pressure to pirate. People who need my app are solving a "terrible problem" (printing labels). They aren't the kind of customer that would seek out a pirated copy or try to pirate it.
For example, for a period of time the app's licensing could be bypassed by starting another 14 day free trial using a different email address. After watching these "clones" keep re-registering every two weeks (for maybe 20 weeks!), I finally updated the licensing to be slightly more restrictive: you can register again but the 2nd free trial on any particular computer is limited to 4 hours, the 3rd registration doesn't show a free trial.
Guess what happened? ~50 new customers over two weeks, all from a particular geography. It was wild. But I've had no complaints.
Long story short: People will pay to solve the soul-crushing task of label printing. I joke that I write the colonoscopy of the software world. It can be a dirty job.
Happy to take any feedback or answer questions.
(I wish there was an easy way to disable the shader based on GPU specs…)