MakeKeeper licence

MakeKeeper is source-available, licensed under the Functional Source License, FSL-1.1-ALv2. The full source is published, you can read it, build it, change it and run it — including at work — and it costs nothing.

It is deliberately not open source. That phrase has a formal definition maintained by the Open Source Initiative, and one of its clauses forbids a licence from restricting any field of use. This licence restricts exactly one, so the honest word is “source-available”. We would rather be accurate than borrow a label.

This page is a plain-language summary, not the licence. Where the two differ, the licence wins.

What you may do

• Run MakeKeeper for anything you like — at home, in a workshop, in a company, on any number of machines.
• Read, modify and rebuild the source.
• Self-host it for your team, your club or your family.
• Publish your changes, and use it as a base for something of your own.

What you may not do

• Offer MakeKeeper — as it is or modified — to third parties as a commercial product or service that competes with it. Running a hosted MakeKeeper for paying customers is the case this forbids.

There is no second restriction. Everything that is not a competing commercial offering is permitted.

Two years later, it becomes Apache-2.0

Every released version is additionally licensed under Apache-2.0 two years after its release date. The restriction above expires with it: version by version, the whole project turns into ordinary permissive open source on a rolling schedule. Nothing is ever taken back.

Commercial licence

If you do want to build a commercial service on MakeKeeper, that is a conversation rather than a refusal — open an issue and say what you have in mind.

The text that governs

The canonical licence lives with the code: LICENSE.md. It is the agreement; this page is an explanation of it.