Free licences for open-source maintainers.

Who qualifies

Three things. They're all answerable from the repository, which is why the form asks for a link to it and little else.

• You maintain it

  You wrote it, or you're one of the people who keeps it alive. A merged pull request from two years ago is a contribution rather than a maintainership, and that's the line.

• It isn't company-funded

  You do it in your own time. GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, one-off donations and having your server costs covered are all fine. What doesn't count is a project that's really a company's product, or one you're paid a salary to work on.

• It's still maintained

  Recent commits, or recent answers on issues and pull requests. Either will do. A small library that's finished and correct still counts, as long as you'd fix it if it broke.

That's the whole rule. If it describes you, you qualify, and there's no queue and no monthly limit to be unlucky with. There's deliberately no popularity bar either: I'm not counting stars, and a package three people depend on gets the same answer as one that three thousand do.

What you get

A Solo licence. One developer, two machines, twelve months of updates, and a key that never expires, so the copy you have carries on working after that window closes. It's exactly what somebody who paid for it gets, because handing out a lesser version would be a strange way to say thank you.

One thing to know before you ask: Dotvault is a Mac app and it's Apple Silicon only. If you aren't on an M-series Mac there's nothing here for you to run yet, and I'd rather say so now than after you've filled in a form.

What I want back

Nothing. No tweet, no review, no backlink, no public thank you and no logo on a page somewhere. I'm not asking you to try it and report back either. If the app is good enough to talk about then you'll talk about it, and if it isn't, a bought mention wouldn't have saved it.