FirmwareLeaks is intended to publish stolen and private firmware, in particular those that are based on open source firmwares like QMK.

Many companies that produce keyboards don't develop their own firmware from scratch inorder to safe costs. Instead, they use a well-established open source firmware like Quantum Mechanical Keyboard Firmware (QMK) and modify it. According to the licensing of open source software (GNU General Public License (GPL)), any modified open source software is opene source itself and must be published as such. It is not allowed to make open source based code properietary.

However, most keyboard manufacturers don't value the open source idea and violate the license agreement by keeping our firmware private.

They literally steal the public source code to make their profit. They not only make their stolen source code private, but also refuse to publish the compiled source code (binaries) to offer it as an official download for their customers. Often, consumers are left without the firmware in order to hard-reset their keyboards. Given the fact that many of those private firmwares are buggy and causes keyboards to crash or brick, holding back the firmware can be really frustrating for the users.

FirmwareLeaks is an attempt to leak such stolen firmware.

Please feel welcome to contribute by providing the firmware (binaries and source code when available) to help to make this a useful source for leaked firmware. Please contact [email protected] if you want to leak firmware for your keyboard model.

If you don't find your firmware here, you can always go to the original QMK resource and check if they have reverse engineered your keyboard model. You can then use the QMK Toolbox to build and flash the specific firmware to your keyboard.