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Devlooped (GitInfo, ThisAssembly, …)

Devlooped is Daniel Cazzulino's (kzu) package family — around thirty small, widely-used .NET libraries and tools. The best known are GitInfo (git metadata as compile-time constants) and ThisAssembly (assembly info, resources, project properties and constants exposed via source generators), alongside nugetizer, Merq, dotnet-trx, dotnet-retest, dotnet-vs, SmallSharp, TableStorage, CredentialManager and more. Devlooped is also the home of Moq.

In October 2025 these packages adopted the Open Source Maintenance Fee (OSMF): the MIT source is unchanged, but the binary releases carry an OSMF EULA and a single fee covers the entire family.

What Changed

This is the third act in a long story about sustainability at Devlooped.

  1. SponsorLink v1 (August 2023). A closed-source, obfuscated build-time component bundled into Moq 4.20.0. It was removed two versions later after a significant backlash — the full story is on the Moq page.
  2. SponsorLink v2 (November 2024). Rebuilt in the open: an offline check against a locally synced, signed manifest, producing editor-only warnings that never fail a CLI or CI build. GitInfo adopted it in v3.5.0 (2 November 2024).
  3. OSMF EULA (October 2025). SponsorLink was dropped in favour of a plain contractual model. ThisAssembly's commit says it outright — "Drop SponsorLink, adopt OSMF EULA" (16 October 2025, shipped in v2.1.1) — and GitInfo followed a day later ("Adopt OSMF EULA", 17 October 2025, shipped in v3.6.0).

As of 8 September 2026, 29 Devlooped repositories ship an osmfeula.txt alongside their MIT license.txt, including GitInfo, ThisAssembly, nugetizer, Merq, dotnet-trx, dotnet-retest, dotnet-vs, SmallSharp, StructId, TableStorage, CredentialManager, Extensions.AI, CloudActors, JQSharp, Jsontron and json5.

Moq is not among them. The devlooped/moq repository carries only License.txt — no OSMF EULA at the time of writing. Moq's own situation is unchanged from the 2023 SponsorLink episode.

The Terms

The EULA is the standard OSMF text, applied to the Binary Release only:

"Project offers a Binary Release of the Software to Users in exchange for a maintenance fee … The Fee applies only to Users that generate revenue by the Software. Non-revenue-generating use of the Software is exempt from this Fee."

Two clauses are worth knowing:

There is no build-time enforcement — no SponsorLink, no SponsorCheck, no network calls. The obligation is contractual.

Who Pays and How Much

Paid via GitHub Sponsors. One fee covers all current and future Devlooped packages — there is no per-project or per-package licensing.

The tiers apply to organizations engaged in revenue-generating activity, sized by employee count rather than revenue — note that this differs from the revenue thresholds used by Polly, Verify and json-everything. Individuals, non-profits and non-revenue use are exempt; personal sponsorship tiers ($1–$5/month) exist separately for anyone who wants to contribute anyway.

What This Means For You

Alternatives

  1. Self-compile from source:

    • The MIT license is untouched and the EULA explicitly permits self-compiled binaries. For packages this small, building them into your own internal feed is genuinely practical.
    • Cons: you own the build pipeline and the update cadence.

  2. Pin pre-EULA versions:

    • Anything released before mid-October 2025 has no EULA.
    • Cons: no fixes, and GitInfo in particular has shipped meaningful work since (v3.6.1, June 2026).

  3. Replace GitInfo — git metadata at build time:

    • MinVer (Apache-2.0) — versions from git tags, minimal configuration.
    • Nerdbank.GitVersioning (MIT) — versioning plus generated ThisAssembly constants, which covers part of both libraries at once.
    • GitVersion (MIT) — branch-strategy-driven versioning, heavier but standard in CI.

  4. Replace ThisAssembly:

    • Nerdbank.GitVersioning generates a comparable ThisAssembly class; otherwise a small Microsoft.CodeAnalysis incremental generator, or plain MSBuild-generated constants, covers the common cases.
    • Cons: you reimplement the resource/string/project-property conveniences ThisAssembly gives you for free.

  5. Replace the tooling packages:

    • nugetizer → stock dotnet pack with hand-written .nuspec/MSBuild properties.
    • dotnet-trx / dotnet-retest → dotnet test --logger trx plus a CI script or your test platform's own retry support.

Conclusion

Devlooped's ~30 packages keep their MIT source, but binary releases published from mid-October 2025 carry an OSMF EULA: $10–$60/month by employee count for revenue-generating organizations, one fee for the whole family, with no build-time enforcement and no restriction on self-compiling. Moq is not covered. For most teams this is the cheapest item on this site; for teams whose policy bars EULA-bearing packages, GitInfo and ThisAssembly have close MIT/Apache substitutes in MinVer, Nerdbank.GitVersioning and GitVersion.

Links and References

Related News

  • 2025-10-17

    Devlooped packages adopt the Open Source Maintenance Fee

    Devlooped dropped SponsorLink and attached an OSMF EULA to its binary releases - ThisAssembly on 16 October 2025 (v2.1.1), GitInfo a day later (v3.6.0), and around 29 repositories in total including nugetizer, Merq, dotnet-trx and dotnet-retest. The MIT source is unchanged and self-compiling is explicitly permitted. One fee of $10-$60/month by headcount covers every Devlooped package; Moq is not among them.

  • 2024-11-02

    GitInfo adopts SponsorLink v2 in v3.5

    Daniel Cazzulino brought SponsorLink - rebuilt as an open-source, offline check against a locally synced signed manifest - to GitInfo 3.5.0. Consumers who are not sponsors see an editor-only build warning; CLI and CI builds never check sponsorship. It was superseded a year later by the Open Source Maintenance Fee EULA.