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 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.