# License and contributing terms

slonbase is free and open source under the **Apache License 2.0**. You can use it for anything,
including commercial work, change it, host it for others and sell services around it, without
asking and without paying. This page says what that means in practice.

## What you can do

- **Use** slonbase for personal, commercial and internal projects, on your own servers or a
  provider's, with no limits on users, projects, data or instances.
- **Modify** it and keep your changes private, or share them. You don't have to publish changes
  you make for your own use, including when you host it for others.
- **Redistribute** it, modified or not. Keep the license and the `NOTICE` file, and say which
  files you changed.
- **Sell** products and hosting built on it.

## What the license adds to MIT

- **An explicit patent license** from every contributor, which ends for anyone who sues over
  patents in slonbase.
- **No trademark rights.** The name "slonbase" and its logo belong to the maintainer. See the
  [trademark policy](https://github.com/ayeshrodz/slonbase/blob/main/TRADEMARKS.md): you can say
  your product is built with or compatible with slonbase, and you shouldn't name a fork or a
  product in a way that could be confused with it.
- **Notices:** keep the copyright and `NOTICE` files and mark files you changed.

## Releases up to 2.3.0 were MIT

Versions 2.3.0 and earlier were released under the MIT License, and they stay available under it
for anyone who has them. Releases after 2.3.0 are under the Apache License 2.0.

## Third-party code

The dashboard includes Preact and htm, the documentation site includes marked, and the dashboard
ships the IBM Plex Sans and JetBrains Mono fonts. Each keeps its own license; the
[`NOTICE`](https://github.com/ayeshrodz/slonbase/blob/main/NOTICE) file lists them. The Rust
dependencies are under permissive licenses (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC and similar).

## Contributing, and the CLA

Contributions are welcome. You keep the copyright in what you write. Before a first pull request
is merged, you sign the
[contributor license agreement](https://github.com/ayeshrodz/slonbase/blob/main/CLA.md) once, by
replying to a bot comment. It licenses your work to the project under the Apache License 2.0, and
also lets the maintainer license it under other terms in future, so the project can change its
licensing without tracking down every contributor.

## What stays free, and what may be added

Everything released under the Apache License 2.0 stays under it. The maintainer may in future
offer separately licensed commercial features and hosted services alongside the open source
project; the CLA exists to make that possible. Nothing like that exists today, and the project
isn't built for it: slonbase is a free project made to be used and to grow.

This page is a plain-language summary, not legal advice. The [license text](https://github.com/ayeshrodz/slonbase/blob/main/LICENSE) is what applies.