license · fair-code

Free to run. Yours to change. Not yours to sell.

Every impire-io project — the five soulsystem components, PRA, and imps — is source-available under the Sustainable Use License, the fair-code license written by n8n. The code is on GitHub, the design logs are public, and self-hosting is free, forever.

What you can do, no questions asked

What needs an agreement

Offering the software to others as a paid product or service. If you want to sell it, host it for customers, or build a commercial offering on top of it, that requires a separate agreement — get in touch through GitHub.

That's the whole trade: self-hosting stays wide open, and turning the same substrate into someone else's paid platform becomes a conversation instead of a surprise.

The MIT history

Everything published before this change was MIT-licensed, and a granted license is irrevocable: those released versions remain MIT. The Sustainable Use License applies from each component's next release onward. Each repository's LICENSE file states this explicitly.

Why fair-code and not open source

The Sustainable Use License is not an OSI-approved open-source license, and we don't call it one. The ecosystem's bet is that the substrate is the product and you run it yourself — that use stays free. What the license closes is the one lane MIT left open: a third party packaging the same substrate as a hosted commercial service with no relationship to the project. The reasoning, including what would make us reverse it, is recorded in the public journey log.

The license text

The authoritative text lives in each repository's LICENSE file — for example soulstream's. It is the Sustainable Use License, version 1.0, unchanged.