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
> Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too?
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.
I've been following Keygen for quite a few years (but alas, no projects suitable to try it), partly because of the excellent docs about licensing schemes, and partly because licensing systems (and the breaking thereof) have been a recurring interest to me ever since punching in a building's worth of XP keys and wondering, none of these boxes are connected to anything... how do they know what I typed in is valid?
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.
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 :)
I started my indie electron app a year after Keygen started. I looked at Keygen when I launched a version of my app off the app stores. I needed a way to license and have complete control.
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.
What laptop GPU? I tried to tone it down a bit for iGPUs but I may need to tweak it more. Sorry about that. Runs smooth on our 2019 MBPs, iPad minis, and iPhones, but I know that’s not a big test pool. It’s a webgl fragment shader, so it’ll be GPU-heavy, not CPU-heavy.
(I wish there was an easy way to disable the shader based on GPU specs…)
[+] [-] EMIRELADERO|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] ezekg|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EFruit|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lfconsult|2 years ago|reply
Edit: I'm a happy user ;-)
[+] [-] mook|2 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] semireg|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ezekg|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] kayson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezekg|2 years ago|reply
Happy to take any feedback or answer questions.
[+] [-] arp242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezekg|2 years ago|reply
(I wish there was an easy way to disable the shader based on GPU specs…)
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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