Licence
Free to use. Free at work. Free to keep.
Rutba Office is dual-licensed: the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 for everyone, and a separate commercial licence for the narrow set of things the AGPL does not allow.
Almost certainly you
If you are installing it and using it
You have no obligations. None.
Install it on one machine or a thousand. Use it at home, in a business, in a school, in a government department. Open client work in it, bill for the result, and never tell anyone what you used. Copyleft licences bind distribution, not use, and nothing in the AGPL asks a user of the software for anything.
The one thing to know: You are also allowed to read the source, change it, and give copies to anyone. That is not a loophole; it is the licence working as intended.
If you are building on it
What the AGPL asks in return
Two conditions, and they only start when you hand the software (or a service running it) to someone else.
- Distribute it and the source goes with it. If you ship a modified version to anyone, they get the same freedoms you had, including the corresponding source.
- Run it as a network service and the same applies. This is the Affero clause, section 13: users interacting with a modified version over a network must be able to get its source. It is the clause that makes AGPL different from GPL, and the reason it is the licence chosen here.
The other licence
When the AGPL does not fit
Some perfectly reasonable things the AGPL will not let you do. For those there is a commercial licence that removes the copyleft obligations.
- • Embedding the engine in a closed-source product you sell.
- • Distributing a modified version without publishing your changes.
- • Operating it as a hosted service without the section 13 source-availability requirement.
It is a conversation rather than a price list, because the terms depend on what you are building. The licensor is Tech Style Ltd (Company No. 11101491), registered in England & Wales.
The other thing we sell
We built what most people need. If you still need more, that is what this is for.
The community route
A public issue tracker, public discussions, and a repository you can fix it in yourself. Most things end here, it costs nothing, and it is not a lesser version of anything. It is where the roadmap is actually argued out.
Priority support
A commitment on response rather than a place in a queue, and a route that is not a public tracker, which matters when the file that reproduces a fault is one you cannot put on the internet.
Work to order
A format read, a gap closed, an integration built, to a date you agree. We wrote all eighteen engine packages, so this is a change to the engine itself rather than a request passed to somebody else’s vendor.
The people who answer are the people who wrote the engine. There is no support tier to be escalated through, because there is nobody here to escalate to.
What you are buying is speed, not access. Nothing behind either paid route is withheld from the free version. Same suite, same engine, same licence, same source. Priority support moves your problem to the front and puts a commitment behind it; it does not unlock anything, and there is no feature on the other side of a payment.
Like the commercial licence, it is a conversation rather than a price list, because what it costs depends entirely on what you need. And the honest half of that: the suite is in beta, what it does not do yet is published in the repository’s own gaps list, and the fastest way to find out whether we can close your gap is to describe it.
The terms themselves
LICENSE and COMMERCIAL-LICENSE.md, in the repository, are the documents that actually govern. This page is a summary and loses to them.