Most of the software we sell is proprietary — defense logistics, payment kernels, industrial asset tracking. We're not apologetic about that. Commercial viability is what lets us exist and keep building. But underneath every one of those systems is a layer of infrastructure that every African developer rebuilds from scratch, project after project, startup after startup. That layer belongs in the commons.
We open-source the plumbing. The EMV kernel that took two engineers eighteen months to get right. The package ecosystem for business capabilities that nobody wants to specify twice. The application generator that converts a spec into a working system. The tools that make the difference between a three-month project and a three-week project. These are not side projects or demos — they are the actual production code, extracted and cleaned up.
African developers deserve infrastructure-grade open source that works under their constraints: unreliable connectivity, mixed hardware, regulatory environments that don't map to a US or EU playbook. We build it because we need it. We open-source it because you need it too. If you use it, break it, and fix it — submit the PR. That's the whole deal.
Every repository listed here ships in at least one live system. We don't publish prototypes.
Generate business applications from a spec. Describe your data model, business rules, and user roles in a structured DSL — AppGen-X produces a working, deployable application. No scaffolding. No boilerplate. No hand-holding.
pip install appgen
259 business capability packages covering HR, procurement, inventory, compliance, approvals, audit trails, notifications, and more. Each module is independently installable. Use what you need. Ignore the rest. Stop specifying the same thing twice.
pip install apg-[module]
An open-source EMV Level 2 kernel written in Rust. The only production-quality open EMV implementation on the continent. Handles the full contact and contactless flow — Application Selection, GPO, Generate AC, the works. Auditable. Embeddable. No mystery blobs.
cargo add hyperion-emv
Justice navigation for survivors of gender-based violence. Dada Salama maps the legal pathways, shelter networks, and support services in Kenya and East Africa — and presents them in plain language, in Swahili and English, on low-bandwidth connections. This is not a product. It is a responsibility.
We don't require CLAs. We don't ask you to assign copyright. We don't run a contributor program with tiers and badges. PRs welcome. Issues welcome. Opinions welcome.
If you use a package and it's wrong — wrong output, wrong behaviour, wrong assumption about your country's regulations — fix it and submit a PR. That's the whole deal. You know your context better than we do. We'll review promptly, merge fast, and credit you properly.
We maintain a public roadmap on GitHub. Good issues are labelled good first issue. We keep those genuinely approachable — not placeholder work, but real improvements with clear scope.
Bug reports, feature requests, and documentation gaps. github.com/datacraft-co-ke — pick a repo, open an issue. We triage every week.
The fastest way to ask a question, share what you're building, or just lurk. discord.gg/datacraft — engineers from the core team are active daily.
First Tuesday of every month, 18:00 EAT. We demo what shipped, discuss roadmap decisions in public, and take questions. Recorded and posted to YouTube. No registration required — link posted to Discord 24 hours before.
Clone a repo, read the CONTRIBUTING.md, run the test suite locally. Every repo has a dev container config so you're not fighting environment setup for an hour.
We especially welcome contributions that extend coverage to new countries, languages, or regulatory frameworks. If APG's leave module doesn't match your country's labour act, open a PR with the correct rules. You'll have merged it before we could have researched it ourselves.
# the two rules
1. Don't break what works.
2. Leave a test so we know it works.
There is a version of open source as marketing: publish an early-stage library, write a blog post, get stars, declare success. We have no interest in that. Every project in this list runs in production somewhere. Hyperion-EMV processes real transactions. APG modules power real HR and procurement workflows. AppGen-X generates real applications that real users operate. We opened the source after the thing worked, not to figure out whether it could.
That is not modesty — it is a different theory of value. An open-source library that does not work is worse than no library, because it costs you time to discover the failure. We would rather ship one project per year that is genuinely production-ready than twelve projects that require you to do the hard parts yourself. The commons deserves quality, not just quantity.
We also do not open-source our core commercial differentiation. The Lindela mission-planning engine stays closed. The Hyperion-X switching fabric stays closed. That is how we stay solvent, and staying solvent is how we keep funding the open-source work. The open layer and the commercial layer coexist because they serve different purposes — and we are clear about which is which.
"We open-source the infrastructure layer — the stuff every African developer needs but keeps rewriting. We don't open-source experiments. Every OSS project here runs in production somewhere."