- Why isn't the whole thing open source?
-
The FSL gives you nearly everything open source does: read it, self-host it,
modify it, run it for any purpose. What it blocks is a well-funded third
party reselling Comebye-as-a-service against us before we have a moat.
Straight MIT/Apache-2.0 on day one has a well-documented failure mode for
small teams: a cloud vendor with more infrastructure than you forks the
project and out-competes the people who wrote it. It's a deliberate,
time-boxed trade. See
fsl.software for the
license's own reasoning.
- Can you audit, revoke, or sue over internal use?
-
No. FSL's only restriction is offering the software as a competing
commercial product. Running it internally, self-hosting it for your own
fleet, modifying it, reading every line: all explicitly permitted, no
exceptions, no "contact sales" gate.
- What happens if the company disappears?
-
The FSL clock keeps ticking whether or not we're around to enforce it.
Every released version converts to Apache-2.0 two years after release,
automatically, release by release. It doesn't depend on our goodwill or the
business surviving.
- Can a license expiring remotely stop my containers?
-
No, by construction. License keys are Ed25519-signed files verified
offline by the binaries, with no online revalidation call
and no kill switch. A lapsed license blocks new actions, like enrolling
more hosts, after a grace period, but it never touches a workload that's
already running. We're technically incapable of remote revocation, and so
is any future owner of the company, because the mechanism to do it doesn't
exist. See the pricing page for the billing
side of this same commitment.
- What does the Solo "Lifetime" license actually cover?
-
Perpetual use of the Solo tier, all future updates including major versions,
all future Solo-tier features, and security patches, unconditionally. A
lifetime that stopped covering v2 would be a trap, so it doesn't. It does
not cover an SLA (community support only), Team/Enterprise features,
or any future hosted service, since a lifetime price only makes sense for
near-zero-marginal-cost self-hosted software. It's offline-verified the same
way every license is: no kill switch, no carve-out that makes "lifetime"
more revocable than any other tier.
- Why is the agent a different license than the server?
-
The agent runs with root-equivalent access on machines we don't own. You
shouldn't have to take our word for what it does. Apache-2.0 means you can
read every line, compile it yourself, and verify it before you ever run it
as root. The control plane doesn't run on your infrastructure the same way,
which is why it's the one piece with a commercial restriction attached.