Licensing

FerroBRIDGE is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1. The authoritative text is LICENSE, with the parameters in NOTICE. This page summarises it; where the two differ, the licence text wins.

What you may do without asking

Read, build, modify, and redistribute the source, with no fee and no conversation. That covers every non-production use: development, testing, evaluation, and prototyping.

Production use is free for Non-Commercial Purposes, which the licence defines as personal use, academic or scientific research, teaching, and use by a non-profit organisation or public body that is not acting in the course of a business, does not deliver a service for payment, and is not seeking commercial advantage.

What needs a commercial licence

Any other production use. A hospital, clinic, or care provider running FerroBRIDGE between its systems needs one. So does a vendor, an integrator, or any company running it in production. Offering FerroBRIDGE, or a work derived from it, to third parties as a hosted, managed, or embedded service that maps or exchanges health data needs one in every case, and so does selling, sublicensing, or distributing it for a fee, on its own or inside another product.

A commercial licence is arranged with Cadasto B.V., the Licensor, which handles the business side of FerroBRIDGE: write to info@cadasto.com or use https://www.cadasto.com/contact/. Technical questions go to the maintainer named in MAINTAINERS.md.

The change date

Each version becomes available under the Apache License 2.0 four years after that version is published. The licence calls that the Change License, and it is the one place Apache 2.0 appears as a licence of this project’s own code.

There is no open-core tier

The bridge, the server, and the tools are in this repository under the one licence. Nothing is held back to be sold back to you.

Contributions and third-party material

A contribution is licensed under the same licence. You keep your copyright, and you grant the Licensor the relicensing right in CONTRIBUTING.md § Licensing of contributions, recorded by a checkbox in the pull request. Vendored specifications and third-party material keep their upstream terms, recorded in a PROVENANCE.md beside each vendored tree.