License.
Keysat is a hybrid project. The daemon is source-available under a custom license; the four SDKs are open source (MIT). The split is intentional: developers integrating Keysat into their own software should never have to think about license compatibility, while operators running the daemon agree to a few common-sense restrictions that keep the project sustainable.
TL;DR
| Component | License | Use freely? |
|---|---|---|
| Keysat daemon ( keysat-xyz/keysat) |
Keysat Source-Available License 1.0 ( LicenseRef-Keysat-1.0) |
Audit, run, modify ✓ Sell licenses to your own products ✓ Redistribute binaries ✗ Run as a hosted service for others ✗ |
| SDKs ( keysat-client-{rust,ts,python,go}) |
MIT | Anything ✓ Including commercial use, redistribution, modification, sublicensing, private use. |
| Activate-license template ( keysat-activate-template) |
MIT | Anything ✓ Copy the buyer-side actions directly into your own StartOS package. |
Why source-available for the daemon?
Two reasons, both pragmatic:
- The work has real cost. Building Keysat takes time. The source-available model lets the project be funded by operators on the Pro / Patron tiers who get value from a maintained, evolving daemon, without forcing every operator onto a paid tier.
- The "AWS-hosts-our-open-source" failure mode. Fully open-source self-hosted projects routinely get strip-mined by cloud providers who host them as a managed service and capture the revenue. The daemon license forbids this specific pattern. Everything else is permitted: running your own instance, modifying it, auditing the code, selling licenses for your own products through it.
The SDKs are MIT because they sit inside your software. License compatibility there is critical and the MIT license is the modern default for libraries you embed.
What you can do (daemon)
- Audit the source. Read every line; understand the cryptography, the storage, the API surface.
- Run an instance on infrastructure you control. A Start9 box at home, a VPS, a cloud instance: anywhere you deploy it.
- Modify it for your needs. Add features, change defaults, integrate it more deeply with your StartOS package. Modifications remain under the same license.
- Operate it as your private licensing service to issue signed license keys for software products you sell or distribute. This is the intended use case. Keysat exists for this.
- Maintain a public fork. Forks on GitHub are fine as long as they carry the license unchanged and don't enable any of the prohibited uses below.
What you can't do without prior permission (daemon)
- Distribute compiled binaries to third parties. Including free of charge. The intent is that operators run Keysat themselves; they don't hand pre-built copies to others.
- Provide Keysat as a hosted / managed service to third parties. "Keysat-as-a-Service" run by a cloud provider for a fee, or by anyone other than the operator using it for their own products, is the one pattern explicitly forbidden. Your own customers receiving signed license keys from your instance are not a hosted service. That's the daemon's intended use case.
- Sell, sublicense, lease, or rent the daemon software itself. Distinct from selling licenses through the daemon, which is allowed.
- Remove copyright notices or this license text.
If you have a use case that crosses one of these lines (commercial redistribution, white-label deployment, a managed-service offering), email licensing@keysat.xyz. The license isn't designed to be a wall; it's designed to make commercial expansion an explicit conversation rather than an implicit one.
Contributions
By submitting code, documentation, designs, or other contributions to the upstream daemon repo, you grant Keysat a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, modify, relicense, and redistribute your contribution under the same license (or any later version). You retain ownership of your contribution; this is a license-back, not an assignment. The full text is in LICENSE Section 4.
Full license text
The authoritative text lives at github.com/keysat-xyz/keysat/blob/main/LICENSE. This page is a plain-English summary; the LICENSE file is what governs in any conflict.
SDK licenses
Each SDK ships under the MIT License, included verbatim in the LICENSE file of each repo:
You can use these in any software: open-source, closed-source, commercial, free, anything. The only obligation MIT imposes is preserving the copyright notice when you redistribute the SDK source itself.
Commercial inquiries
For commercial redistribution, resale, hosted-service rights, white-label deployment, or any other use not expressly granted by the source-available license: licensing@keysat.xyz.