Licensing Model

Our licensing strategy balances maximum openness with a sustainable business model.

0BSD Components

Parts of the codebase that are purely infrastructural are released under the 0BSD license, a near-public domain license that imposes no attribution or redistribution requirements. You may use, copy, modify, and redistribute them without restriction.

Open-Core Approach

Ocelot-Cloud is offered in two editions:

Edition Price License Purpose
Community Edition (CE) Free AGPL-3.0 Fully open-source core
Premium Edition (PE) Paid Proprietary Advanced, non-essential features

The PE generates revenue to fund development.

AGPL + CLA (Temporary)

The AGPL-3.0 copyleft license and our Contributor License Agreement (CLA) are primarily safeguards against proprietary capture, situations where a well-funded company could fork the project, close the source, and commercialize it without contributing back.

  • AGPL-3.0 forces any publicly deployed derivative to remain open-source.
  • The CLA assigns contribution ownership to us, allowing us, not outside actors, to dual-license the same code for the PE to fund our work.

Once we have developed the PE to a point where the risk of proprietary capture is minimized, we plan to remove that protection and relicense the CE under 0BSD, so that developers no longer have to read or sign legal documents in order to contribute. Then, under the terms of the 0BSD license, all prior claims of ownership will be extinguished as if the CLA never existed.

What this means for users

  • Running CE unmodified: No obligations, use it privately or internally as you wish.
  • Deploying a modified CE:
    • Your code modifications are automatically licensed under AGPL-3.0.
    • You must make the modified source code available to any user who has access to your modified version.
    • You may, but are not required to, contribute the modified code to our GitHub repository via pull request for others to benefit.

What this means for contributors

When contributing to Ocelot-Cloud:

  1. Fork the repo and implement your changes.
  2. Sign the legal/cla.md once by copying the legal/cla-signing-template.md to legal/contributors/<your-github-name>.md and fill it out.
  3. Open a pull request.

Your signature covers all future contributions.