JAKARTA - Earlier this year, popular community coding platform Stack Overflow advertised a fake copy-paste (copy-paste) keyboard that users can now buy. Called "The Key," this keyboard was originally introduced as an April Fool's joke. With just three keys – CTRL, C, and V – this tiny keyboard is meant to poke fun at how often code is copied from websites.
On April 1, anyone who copies the code from Stack Overflow will be greeted with a pop-up letting them know they have a limited number of free copies and they can have unlimited copies if they buy The Key.
Although this is, of course, not true and Stack Overflow remains a free-to-use community, allowing its developers to see how many times content was copied, from where, and how fast. They found that the community-run copy-paste jokes were absolutely accurate, as a quarter of Stack Overflow's 15 million users copied something within five minutes of visiting the site.
In response to a growing number of people asking where they can get one of the real keyboards, Stack Overflow linked up with Drop, a site that could best be described as an online designer tech store.
One of Drop's designers brought The Key idea to life and, on September 28, a number of copies were sold. This item sells out quickly, so a new product is on the way to fulfill pre-order needs and is expected to ship on December 13th, or just in time to make a stack of Christmas gifts for coding friends.
The Stack Overflow team has shared that their share of this proceeds, along with five percent of Drop's share, will be donated to digitalundivided. This Non-Profit Enterprise supports black and Latino women entrepreneurs by connecting their communities with the resources they need to thrive in innovation and technology.
So, for $29, anyone can now own a three-key programmable keyboard and contribute to silly jokes with a starting purpose.
Considering the Stack Overflow data collected from the monitored time period from March 26 to April 9, it's no surprise The Key is already sold out. The number of CTRL+C fetched by the system increased to 40,623,987 copies in 7,305,042 posts and comments.
Stack Overflow decided to publicly show off these numbers to encourage people to reuse solutions that others have found and to reassure all their users that there's no need to feel guilty for not writing everything from scratch. While it may not be for everyone, The Key certainly continues the idea.
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