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: 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 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 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 is what applies.