Enketo Now Fully Open Source

The Grid Theme is now open source!

Why?

The Grid Theme had been kept proprietary to give the paid service a better chance at generating revenue, but this did not sufficiently materialize. Therefore, Enketo is shifting its focus to development without directly providing services*. To scale the product further (but not the company), we will actively promote the integration of Enketo into existing tools and services - which is already proving to be quite successful. One way of doing this is by fully embracing open-source.

With the financing provided by two of my favorite organizations: iMMAP and HHI (KoBo), the Grid Theme has now been added to Enketo Core. This means it will be available to anybody to use as they please under the terms of terms of the permissive Apache2 license.

I should mention that the development of the Grid Theme early in 2014 was originally paid for by two other of my favorite organizations and ongoing Enketo sponsors: the Santa Fe Institute and Shack/Slum Dwellers International.

Bonus

The old Enketo Smart Paper app (aka Enketo Legacy) also had a proprietary module to provide form authentication. This module has now become open-source as well and and has been added to the Enketo Legacy repository. Since Enketo Legacy will soon become obsolete, due to the development of a brand new Enketo Smart Paper app, this news is probably less exciting.

100% open source

With the release of these last two modules, every line of Enketo code is now open-source. There are no plans to develop any new proprietary additions.

* There will be a separate announcement about any changes to the enketo.org service in due course. Free users should start looking for an alternative (e.g. self-hosting).