📜 LICENSE CLASS: 📖 SOURCE-AVAILABLE
Executive Summary: What is it?
The Sustainable Use License (often associated with the "Fair Code" movement) is a "Source Available" license, not an Open Source license by the OSI definition. It grants you broad rights to view, modify, and use the software for free, but only for internal business, non-commercial or personal purposes.
The Restriction: The Use Restriction
You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use, and you may distribute it or provide it to others only free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
- Internal Operations: Hosting the software internally to automate your own business workflows is permitted.
- Professional Services: The licensor's FAQ permits paid consulting: running workflows for clients on your own instance as long as clients cannot access the software or create or edit workflows, or installing and maintaining it on a client's own server as long as you do not also host it.
- Commercial Hosting: Offering the software to others as a hosted or managed service is permitted only free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
CFO / Business Impact: What does it cost/risk?
Safe for Internal Use. Using the software to run your own business is permitted, with no license fee. The risk lies in any use beyond your own internal business, such as hosting the software for others or selling a product whose value comes entirely or substantially from it.
Technical Reality: How does it work?
The source code is public: you can fork it, fix bugs, and deploy it yourself, for example via Docker. Whether a build sends telemetry, or locks features behind a commercial key (an Enterprise Edition), is the vendor's choice, not the license's: check the vendor's documentation for both.