[mook]

It looks like they very carefully did not claim it to be open source :)

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 :)

[burnte]

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.

[ezekg]

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.”

[iseletsk]

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.

[ezekg]

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

[jamietanna]

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