Kwker

Licensing

Kwker is source-available: you can read and build all of it. Small companies use it free. Larger organizations pay for one yearly license, and vendors that ship Kwker inside their products sign an OEM license. Kwker has no license keys, no activation and no telemetry, so the license is an agreement, not a check in the code.

You are License Cost
An organization with fewer than 100 people and less than USD 1,000,000 revenue in the prior tax year (2019 dollars, adjusted for inflation: about USD 1.3 million today) PolyForm Small Business 1.0.0 with the Kwker Additional Permissions Free
Any other organization that runs Kwker Kwker Commercial License Yearly, by revenue
A vendor that ships Kwker inside its own software, SDK, appliance or hardware package Kwker OEM License Negotiated

People are employees and independent contractors. People and revenue count your whole organization, including every organization that controls it, that it controls, or that is under common control with it.

What each license allows

PolyForm Small Business lets a qualifying organization use Kwker for any purpose, including production and its own commercial products. It applies whenever you use Kwker: once you have 100 people or pass the revenue limit, you need a Commercial License for further use.

The Kwker Commercial License covers the whole organization and its affiliates for its term: any number of developers, servers and cores, internal tools, production systems and hosted services, and contractors working for you. The price depends on your revenue band and stays the same until renewal.

The Kwker OEM License lets a vendor ship Kwker as part of a named product. The product's customers may then run Kwker as part of that product, whatever their size, but may not take Kwker out and use it on its own. Every copy of the product carries the OEM distribution terms (OEM-LICENSE.md, filled in for that vendor) next to the Kwker files. The OEM license puts no conditions on the vendor's own code.

Common cases

Your open-source project depends on Kwker. Kwker keeps its own license inside your project; your project's license, whatever it is, grants no rights to Kwker. Each user who runs the Kwker-backed features needs their own right to run Kwker. Users who never run those features need nothing. Say so in your README.

You only clone, read or build code that includes Kwker. That needs no license purchase. Anyone may get, copy, read, build and pass on unmodified copies of Kwker without running it. Running it, including in tests and CI, is use.

You want to try Kwker first. An organization that does not qualify for the free license may evaluate Kwker for 30 days, outside production and not for its customers.

You run Kwker in a hosted service. That is your own use: you need the free license (if you qualify) or a Commercial License. Your customers do not receive Kwker and need nothing.

You received Kwker inside another company's product. The OEM-LICENSE.md that came with it lets you run Kwker as part of that product. Using Kwker any other way needs one of the other licenses.

You buy a Commercial License. You get a license file that names your organization, its revenue band and its dates, signed by Kwker. Anyone can check that it is genuine with gpg.

The license files

Every Kwker package and the repository carry the same files:

File What it is
LICENSING.md Which license applies to you, in plain language
LICENSE.md The PolyForm Small Business License 1.0.0, unchanged
ADDITIONAL-PERMISSIONS.md Building and passing on Kwker without running it; the 30-day evaluation
COMMERCIAL-LICENSE.md The Kwker Commercial License
OEM-LICENSE.md The terms that ship with Kwker inside a vendor's product
NOTICE.md The notices that must stay with every copy
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md Third-party components and their licenses

Package metadata states the license as the SPDX expression PolyForm-Small-Business-1.0.0 OR LicenseRef-Kwker-Commercial. Kwker is not open source, and no version turns into an open-source license later. Questions: mail@kwker.io.