Licence

Free, without asking: run the applications on your own machines, at home or inside your organisation; read the source, change it, and share your changes for non-commercial use.

Not without asking first: selling them, or running them as part of a commercial product or service, and using them to train or improve an AI model.

On 1 May 2033: the applications become ordinary GPL-3.0 open source. The date is written into every licence, and nobody, including me, can take it back.

The Business Source License is not my invention. MariaDB's founders wrote it, and in 2023 HashiCorp moved Terraform, Vagrant and the rest of its tools to it: the projects Mitchell Hashimoto started and built a company on. The idea is simple. The source is there to read, use and improve, but for a few years the people writing it are not racing someone who sells their own work back to the world before they can.

It is fair to say plainly what the BSL is not. It is not recognised as open source in the full sense: the Open Source Initiative does not approve it, and many in the free software world would call it source-available instead. I understand that, and I share the values behind it, which is why every BSL licence here ends in the GPL. For now I am taking the path less trodden.

It suits a project like this one for three reasons.

• It lets me move fast. Amber Linux is one person, working with AI, and it changes quickly. The BSL lets me publish early without first promising a permanent licence for code that is still being rewritten.
• It leaves room for mistakes. Much of this code is written and audited by AI, and tested by AI driving the applications. If a design turns out wrong, I can throw it away and start again; nothing has been locked into a licence that outlives the mistake.
• The end is fixed. The change date is written into the licence: in 2033 the applications are open source in the full sense, whatever happens to me or to the project.

Not everything in Amber Linux is under the BSL. The theme is GPL-3.0, the tool server, calendar and inspector are AGPL-3.0, the packaging and this website are BSD-3-Clause, and the fonts, models and upstream tools we package keep their own licences. Where this page and a repository's LICENSE file disagree, the LICENSE file is right.

The Odin libraries the applications share are BSD-3-Clause, with two exceptions. Where a library includes someone else's code, it keeps that code's licence: odin-md4c and odin-tomlc are MIT, as md4c and tomlc17 are. And a library still in development is under the BSL, as odin-web, amber-recall and amber-tools are today: it buys the time to develop them behind closed doors, while letting in the people we like who have signed the contributor licence agreement.

Contributors are welcome. Most of the application repositories are private for now, while their audit finishes, but that does not have to keep anyone out: if you would like to work on Amber Linux, write to hyperquader@gmail.com, say what interests you, and I will give you access on GitHub.

Amber Linux is written with AI assistance: I direct the work, and AI writes and audits much of the code. AI-assisted contributions are welcome on the same terms. Use whatever tools help you; what matters is that you have read what you send, that it works, and that you can stand behind it.

Contributions come with a short contributor licence agreement, so that what you write can travel with the rest of the code. It is at the end of this page.

Everyone who contributes code signs this agreement once, before their first contribution is submitted. Fill in the lines at the end and send it with your first pull request, or by email. It lets your work be released with the rest of the project: under the BSL now, and under GPL-3.0 from 2033.