Copyleft

We love self-hosting. That’s why this site exists in the first place.

A big part of self-hosting is free and open-source software (FOSS). Without FOSS the self-hosting community would not be able to thrive as it currently does.

What is copyleft?

Copyleft is a concept that notably gained traction through the Free Software Foundation and their GNU General Public License (GPL). The GNU website goes into much more detail: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html

In a nutshell:

Copyleft is a general method for making a program (or other work) free (in the sense of freedom, not “zero price”), and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well.

fsoc Copyleft

We publish this website, all its contents, and all our projects under the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3 (AGPL-v3).

LICENSE.md Template

<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
Copyright (C) <year>  <name of author>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

For information about future proprietary licensing, see LICENSING.md.

LICENSING.md Template

Licensing and Future Dual Licensing

This project is currently licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-v3). You can find the full license text in the LICENSE file.

Future Dual Licensing: The copyright holder(s) reserve the right to offer this software under additional proprietary or commercial licenses in the future. This means that while the AGPL-v3 version will always remain available, proprietary versions (with different terms) may also be offered for specific use cases.

By contributing to this project, you agree that your contributions may be used in both the open-source (AGPL-v3) and any future proprietary versions.

README.md Snippet

LICENSING
This project is open-source under AGPL-v3. See LICENSE for details.

Note: The project maintainers reserve the right to offer proprietary or commercial licenses in the future. The AGPL-v3 version will always remain available.

Contributor License Agreement (CLA) Snippet

You grant the project maintainers a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute your contributions under both the current open-source license (AGPL-v3) and any future proprietary or commercial licenses.