On October 5, Coffey Labs became Coffey Labs LLC, an Arizona limited liability company. The company now owns the projects it builds and maintains: inbuxa, ihasmail, ihasvpn, Cairn OBS and the tools around them. The formal announcement is on coffeylabs.org, and it's short on purpose. This is the longer version, in my own words, on my own site.
Short version first: if you run any of this software, nothing you do changes. Same licenses, same source, same sites, same person answering issues. What changes is who owns it, and that turns out to matter more than I thought it would.
Why an LLC at all
Until this week, the answer to "who owns ihasmail?" was "John, I suppose." That was fine while the software was mine in every sense. I wrote it to solve my own problems, and I published it because a problem worth solving once is usually someone else's too.
Then people started running it on their own servers. ihasmail picked up users I'd never met. inbuxa launched in September as a complete mail server, which means somebody out there trusts it with their organization's mail. Once other people depend on your software, "I suppose" isn't a good enough answer.
A company is a better answer, for a few plain reasons:
- The code, the names and the domains have one owner. Before, they were spread across a personal account here and a registrar account there, and sometimes they were just assumed. Now they belong to a legal entity with a name, and the copyright notice in every file says so.
- Licensing questions have someone to ask. Copyleft only works if someone holds the copyright and can stand behind the license. If a company wants to check whether its use of inbuxa is compliant, "email [email protected]" beats "find John's personal address and hope."
- The projects can outlive my attention. The company's operating agreement has a succession plan. If I'm hit by a bus tomorrow, there's a document that says who holds the projects and what happens to them. A pile of repositories under one person's login has nothing like that.
- Work and personal life get a line between them. That covers legal exposure, but it also covers the everyday stuff. Company mail goes to company addresses, company commits come from a company address, and my personal inbox stops being the contact point for software other people run.
- Funding and sponsorship have something to attach to. A grant, a sponsorship or a support contract is far easier to define, and to win, when it goes to a company with a name, an EIN and a bank account than when it goes to "a guy and his repositories." Sponsors know what they're backing and where the money goes, and the money stays with the projects.
- Other people can own a piece of it. As an individual, I could accept contributions but had no way to share what grows from them. A company can bring in contributors as members and give them a real stake in whatever comes next: hosted services, support, or solutions built on top of these products. The code stays open either way. Ownership is about the future growth, not about closing anything.
None of this is exotic. It's what you do when a hobby has turned into something people rely on.
Why now
Three things landed at the same time.
The projects became products. On August 30 I retired LINUXexpert.org. The writing came here and the projects went to coffeylabs.org under the Coffey Labs name. That made the split obvious. On one side were essays with a byline. On the other was software with users, releases, security advisories and a public issue tracker. The second kind needs an owner that isn't a byline.
I found out what a single point of failure looks like. On September 20, the day inbuxa launched, GitHub suspended my account. Both organizations hung off that one personal account, and every repository in them went dark with it. Nothing was lost, because the code was never kept there, and it all moved to my own Gitea within days. But it was a very clear lesson in how much of "Coffey Labs" was really just one person's login. The LLC is the same lesson applied to ownership.
Waiting only makes it harder. Every month adds more repositories, more domains, more contributors and more places where my name stands in for a company that doesn't exist. Moving ownership is a paperwork job, and paperwork jobs grow. Doing it while the whole estate still fits in one person's head is much cheaper than untangling it later.
So I filed on October 5. The EIN arrived the next day. Over the following days the copyright headers, the contact addresses, the privacy notices and the company site all changed to match.
What changes
Most of it you'll only notice if you go looking:
- Copyright notices say Coffey Labs LLC. New files carry
SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Coffey Labs LLC, and the existing headers have been switched over. - The contact addresses are company addresses. legal@, privacy@, security@, hello@ and [email protected] each go somewhere specific, and none of them is my personal mailbox.
- coffeylabs.org is a company site now. It has a new design, a news section, a press page and terms of use. It also has a tagline I'm rather pleased with: Built to be run, not rented.
- Licensing questions, security reports and press inquiries have a clear route, and an organization at the other end of it.
What doesn't change
This is the part I care most about, so here it is plainly:
- Every project stays open source under its current license. Copyleft by default, and forks keep their upstream's license. The LLC changes nothing about any license.
- There's no paid tier, and nothing is held back. No "community edition" with the good parts missing. Coffey Labs LLC sells nothing today.
- The source stays where it is. It lives on git.coffeylabs.org and is mirrored to GitHub. Your clones, your remotes and your release downloads all work as before.
- Each product keeps its own site, its own docs and its own community. ihasmail stays independent of inbuxa. Neither is being folded into anything.
- The same person is doing the work. For now I'm the only member. The company doesn't have investors or a board, and nobody can tell me to put a paywall in front of anything. If other people join later, they'll be people who do the work, and the licenses come with the deal.
- This site stays mine. jcoffey.dev is personal and isn't part of the company. The writing here is my opinion, not a corporate position, and my browser games stay personal projects too.
If Coffey Labs ever does sell something, like hosting or support, it'll be clearly separate from the open-source projects and you'll hear about it here first. coffeylabs.org is a place for the software, and it isn't going to turn into a sales page.
The honest bit
An LLC isn't a magic shield. It doesn't make the code any better, it doesn't answer issues faster, and it doesn't hire anyone on its own. It's a one-person company with a filing number, an EIN and a stack of paperwork I'm still working through.
What it does is make one thing true that wasn't before: the software people depend on has an owner that will still exist after my enthusiasm, my GitHub account or I don't.
The work started in 2018 as LINUXexpert.org. It became Coffey Labs in August, and as of this week it's a company. Same work, same licenses, same person, with a proper owner behind it now.