Licensing

WolfStack uses dual licensing. The same source tree is available under two different licences depending on who you are and what you’re doing with it.

Personal & non-commercial

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0

Free, source-available. Read it, fork it, run it on your homelab, learn from it, contribute back.

  • Your home network or personal lab
  • Education, research, evaluation
  • Public-good projects with no revenue
  • Up to 3 hosts on the Community tier
Commercial

WolfStack Commercial Licence

Granted automatically when you subscribe to any paid tier. Overrides the noncommercial restriction in PolyForm.

  • Running WolfStack inside a company
  • Reselling as a managed service / MSP offering
  • Integrating into a paid product
  • Any use that earns or supports revenue

Quick decision tree

  • Are you using it on your home network for personal projects? Free under PolyForm Noncommercial. Install free.
  • Are you a company running WolfStack to manage your own infrastructure? That’s commercial use. Pick a paid tier →
  • Are you an MSP or hosting provider running WolfStack for your customers? Definitely commercial use, plus you want white-label and multi-tenancy. Talk to us about Enterprise →
  • Are you embedding WolfStack into a paid product? Commercial use plus we should probably talk. Contact sales →

What changes vs. the old MIT licence?

Up to and including release v22.9.x, WolfStack was MIT-licensed. Those releases stay MIT-licensed forever — we can’t and don’t want to revoke that. From the next release forward, new code ships under the dual licence above. If you’re running an older MIT release commercially that’s entirely your right; if you upgrade to a release shipped under the new licence and you’re a commercial user, you’ll need a paid tier.

What about contributions?

Contributions accepted under the same dual-licence terms via a short Contributor Licence Agreement. We do this so any single contributor can’t block us issuing commercial licences down the line, which would break the model for everyone. The CLA retains your copyright (it’s a licence to us, not an assignment) and is signed automatically when you open your first pull request.

Full licence text

Honest framing

The dual-licence model is how MariaDB, Sidekiq, and many other production OSS projects keep the lights on while staying source-available. WolfStack is a real piece of infrastructure software with a real cost to develop and support — the noncommercial licence ensures hobbyists stay covered, and the commercial licence funds the work. If you’re paying for any tier, your commercial-use rights are already covered — nothing else to read or sign.

❤ Support WolfStack

Even if you stay on Community, sponsoring the project on GitHub helps us ship faster. From £3/mo on GitHub Sponsors you also get the private sponsors-only Discord.

Support WolfStack
Esc