Licensing

Flywheel's code is licensed under the Functional Source License, version 1.1, with an MIT future license (FSL-1.1-MIT). The full terms are in LICENSE. This page explains them in plain words; where the two differ, LICENSE governs.

What you can do now

• Use Flywheel for your own work, at home or inside a company, including commercial work.
• Read, change and build on the code, and run your changed copy.
• Self-host it, on your own machines or your organization's.
• Use it for non-commercial teaching and research.
• Use it while you provide professional services to someone who is also using it under these terms.
• Share copies, as long as the license terms or a link to them and the copyright notices go with them.

What the license does not allow

Offering Flywheel, or something built from it, to others as a commercial product or service that substitutes for Flywheel or offers the same or substantially similar functionality. The license calls this a Competing Use.

When it becomes MIT

Each release converts to the MIT license on the second anniversary of the day it was published. From then on, that release can be used under MIT, competing uses included. A newer release keeps its own two-year clock.

Other parts of the repository

• Essays and research notes are licensed under CC BY 4.0; the list of folders and how to credit them is in LICENSE-TEXT.
• Tools Flywheel installs as lanes keep their own licenses. Some are MIT. Each lane's license is in its own repository and in the package it installs.

Why this license

FSL keeps the code open to read, run, change and self-host, while the maintainer, a single person, keeps the ability to be the one who sells it as a service for two years. After that, MIT applies with no conditions.

Flywheel is source-available, not open source in the OSI sense, until a release converts to MIT.