Licensing

Free for personal and noncommercial use.

breakaway is free for personal and noncommercial use. Commercial use is by exception, and some groups can ask for one free.

From 2.0.0, breakaway’s licence is the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. This page says what that means in plain words. It isn’t legal advice: where this page and the licence differ, the licence decides.

#Who uses it free

The licence lets you use, change, and self-host breakaway, and share it with its licence, for a permitted purpose. It names two kinds.

• Personal use. Research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, without any commercial application in view.
• Noncommercial organizations. Charities, educational institutions, public research organizations, public safety or health organizations, environmental protection organizations, and government institutions, however they’re funded.

Free means free: no accounts, no pricing, and no paid features. You run your own board on your own Cloudflare account, and it keeps its data.

#What counts as commercial

Any use the licence doesn’t name as a permitted purpose. Running breakaway for a company’s work, for clients, or for a product you sell is commercial, and so is a personal project with a commercial application in view. If your use isn’t personal use as above, and you aren’t one of the organizations it lists, the licence doesn’t cover it, and you need an exception.

#Exceptions

The owner grants a free commercial licence case by case, to groups whose work fits what breakaway is for:

• Worker co-ops. Businesses owned and run by the people who work in them.
• Digital rights and privacy groups. Including projects that build software to give people back ownership of their digital lives, once the owner has looked at the work.

A company funded by venture capital can’t get an exception, whatever its size. Asking is no promise of a yes, and a yes covers the group and the use it names.

An exception is granted by a signed agreement. Once the owner and the group agree on one, on the request or by email, the owner fills in the licence exception agreement with the group, the use, any limits, and how long, and both sign it. It’s free, it’s only for the group named in it, and it ends if the group stops fitting the groups above, like by taking money from venture capital.

#How to ask

There are two ways. Asking in public comes first: everyone can see who asks and what the owner answers.

1. In public, on GitHub. Open a licence exception request on breakaway’s GitHub.
2. In private, by email, if you’d rather not ask in public. Write to the owner at this address, with this subject:

theanarchox@proton.me

breakaway licence exception: <who you are>

Or start the email in your mail app, with the subject filled in.

Either way, say:

• Who you are: your group’s name, and a link to its site or its work.
• What kind of group you are: a worker co-op, a digital rights or privacy group, or something else, and why it fits.
• How you’re owned and funded: who owns the group, and whether any of its money comes from venture capital.
• What you’d use breakaway for: the work it would run, and roughly how many people would use it.

A request on GitHub is public, so put nothing private in it; an email stays between you and the owner. The owner answers where you asked. A request isn’t a licence: the exception starts when both sides have signed the agreement.

#Releases before 2.0.0

Every release before 2.0.0 stays under the licence it shipped with, FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0, whose text is in LICENSE-FSL. The PolyForm Noncommercial License applies to 2.0.0 and every release after it. The same words are in LICENSING.md, next to the code.