Closing down my business

After 20 years I'm closing my business "Vulnscan". I have no longer been taking new projects for a while now and will officially close all business activities in September 2025.

The past and how it ended
It has been a fun ride. I started my business in January 2005 when IRC was still at its peak. I had quite a bit of custom coding jobs going on back then, usually small one week projects. I had almost 200 customers in the past 20 years, some of whom I served for many years. I liked the diversity of the jobs. Other than selling off-the-shelf modules, projects ranged from customizations for networks ran by volunteers who really wanted to build their own community, to more commercially interesting projects like dating sites. Or even something completely different with complex requirements. It's amazing how IRC is used at such diverse places, even where you don't expect it, sometimes visible, other times purely "behind the scenes". All of this has never been a livable main income - one of several reasons I also work part-time at a high school - but it has been a nice side job where I could enjoy working with IRC and still make some money out of it. Things have been much more quiet the last couple of years with only a few customers with whom I had a long term business relationship. That too will now come to an end.

Module license
In the past, some of my paid modules shipped with a more restrictive LICENSE. I have always distributed the source code to customers and never imposed restrictions on editing the source. However, I did from time to time use a license text that tied a module to an IRC network. This so you had to buy an additional license if you wanted to use the module on another network. Since the company is being dissolved, you can no longer buy such a license anymore. For that practical reason, but also for several other reasons, I want to make the following statement:

Effective immediately, all UnrealIRCd modules I created are licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version (GPL-2.0-or-later).

UnrealIRCd
Just to be clear, for my involvement with the Open Source project UnrealIRCd this changes nothing. I also plan to keep this website around as a personal blog.

Changes
This post was published on July 27, 2025. The text under Module license was added on December 5, 2025.