Licensing
Transparency first
MBHub is not Open Source in the OSI-defined sense. It is Source Available: anyone can read, inspect, audit, fork, learn from, and run the code under the terms of the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. What is reserved is the commercial use right — it belongs exclusively to the project copyright holder. We state this deliberately and up front.
Free vs. commercial at a glance
| Scenario | Free (PolyForm NC) | Commercial license |
|---|---|---|
| Run your own personal node (CLI / TUI) | ✅ | — |
| Educational use, coursework, non-funded research | ✅ | — |
| Security audit / source inspection / fork to study | ✅ | — |
| Contributing improvements back | ✅ | — |
| Embedding MBHub in a paid product or appliance | ❌ | ✅ Required |
| Offering MBHub as a paid SaaS / hosted service | ❌ | ✅ Required |
| Revenue-generating internal production workflow | ❌ | ✅ Required |
| Redistributing derivatives under different terms | ❌ | ✅ Required |
Obtaining a commercial license
Write to [email protected] with your organization, intended use, and expected scale. We offer flat licenses for startups and scalable terms for larger deployments. Not sure whether your case is commercial? Ask — we answer in plain language.
Why this model?
A sovereign, serverless collective memory network takes sustained, long-term engineering. The source stays open for everyone to inspect and learn from; commercial licensing funds that work and keeps development independent. It also keeps the project acquirable as a single, clean entity — code, brand, and commercial rights consolidated from day one.