Why 2030

There is a date in Elba's license. The first of January, 2030. On that morning — no ceremony, no announcement necessary — Elba stops being ours and becomes everyone's, under the MIT license, forever.

People ask why we didn't just make it free from the start. The honest answer is that free things tend to die. They get abandoned, or sold, or slowly turned into something else. Charging a fair price for a small tool is one of the few ways to keep it small.

But we didn't want to hoard it either. A tool that guards your private things ought to, one day, belong to the commons. The fewer parties who can quietly change what it does, the better. Publishing the whole source, eventually, is the strongest promise we can make about what Elba will always be.

So: pay now if you want it now. Wait, if you don't mind waiting. Either way, in 2030, it's yours.

We think of it as mortalware. Software with an end date that is not death.