Hatamoto is Apache 2.0 thanks to Ubuntu Shipit Programme

In the early 2000s I was in my late teens and didn’t own a computer. I’d only ever touched one at school, for a few minutes every few months. The closest I could get otherwise was a cyber cafe 5 km from home that charged 35 rupees an hour, close to one US dollar back then.

I remember saving for a month before I could afford one hour at that cyber cafe to use a computer.

The owner of the cyber cafe ran into trouble one day. He ran 12 machines, all on Microsoft Windows, and some DLL file had gone missing. The errors kept popping up and he couldn't make them stop. He had probably installed or uninstalled something, but my memory fails me here.

I had read online about an operating system called Ubuntu. It was completely free, and they would even mail you a CD. I offered to order one for him, and all I had to do was fill out a form. Honestly, it was more for me than for him despite not having a computer. I wanted to see whether this ShipIt program from some American organisation (or so I assumed) was real or a scam.

A few weeks later a small padded envelope arrived. Inside was a CD with an orange-and-brown label: Ubuntu. It hadn't cost either of us a cent, not even the postage.

I was still suspicious, because free things usually come with a catch.

Booting that disc was the first time I understood what an operating system actually was. It was also my first taste of open source. Although, I built my first website on Microsoft windows and hosted it with a webhost who were selling 10MB packages - I did not know that there was a choice and it was free.

I got a full desktop, a web browser and a package manager that could pull down thousands of other programs, also free. None of it was a trial version.

When I went back to the cafe a month later, every one of the 12 machines was running Ubuntu. The owner offered me an hour for free, on one condition: teach him how to use it. I gladly did, reading the manual off the CD one step ahead of him.

I saw what happens when people give their work away in a way that lets others build on it. Someone, somewhere, decided that a kid they'd never heard of deserved the same tools as everyone else. They paid to post that disc to me, and it changed the direction of my life.

Plenty of projects start open and later move to restrictive licenses, open-core paywalls, or "source available" terms that look open but aren't.

Hatamoto will remain licensed under Apache 2.0, and it will remain free to use and adopt. In practice that means:

• You can use it personally or commercially, on a hobby project or at a Fortune 50 company, with no fees and no seat counts.

• You can modify it. Fork it, bend it to your needs and ship your changes.

• You can redistribute it and bundle it into your own products, open or closed.

• The patent terms are clear. Apache 2.0 includes an explicit patent grant, so you can build on Hatamoto knowing where you stand.

I chose Apache 2.0 on purpose. It's permissive enough that a company can adopt Hatamoto without a legal review that drags on for months, and its patent protection makes long-term adoption safe.

Why this matters to me

That Ubuntu CD came with no conditions. Nobody asked me to justify how I'd use it or to promise to upgrade later. They just trusted me with it.

I want Hatamoto to be that disc for someone else. Whoever you are, you shouldn't have to wonder whether the rug will be pulled out from under you a year from now.

Open source gave me a career, and keeping Hatamoto open is the least I can do to give some of that back.

Get involved

If Hatamoto is useful to you, use it. If you find a bug, open an issue, and if you can fix it, send a pull request. And if you someday build something on top of it that makes someone else's life a little easier, the disc that landed in my mailbox all those years ago will have done its job one more time.

All I ask is do not spam the plugin or theme directory. I outline extensive frustrations with Wordpress in my first post and our plugin and theme contributions follow strict outline of no ads or spam policy.