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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

They explicitly used the phrase "keygen is now open source". Tenth sentence overall, 6th paragraph from the top:

"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.

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You’re right. For the announcement, I used the term “open source” because people generally know what it means (especially in the context of previously being “closed source”). Saying I made something source-available(d?) ends up being confusing to a lot of people who don’t know what that means.

Outside of the announcement and 2/3 of the blog post, I use the phrase “open, source-available.”

What you are doing is trying to get the benefits of claiming that you are open source, without truly making it open source. What is open source is well known in the industry. If you search on google what open source mean - you will find that you don't fit the criteria. It would be much more ethical to truthfully say what you are doing. And don't get me wrong, what you are doing is still great.

I disagree. If I was trying to take advantage of it, I'd use the term "open source" everywhere like some other projects do. But I tried to find a middle ground so the zealots would be happy(ish). But in the end I'll never make everybody happy, regardless of how much I stress about words [0] [1].

[0]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api/issues/644

[1]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api/pull/668

Also "open source" vs "Open Source" is a big difference

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