Licensing

FerroFED is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1. The authoritative text is LICENSE, with the notice in NOTICE. This page summarises it; where the two differ, the licence text wins.

What you may do without asking

Read, build, modify and redistribute the source, with no fee and no conversation. That covers every non-production use: development, testing, evaluation and prototyping.

Production use is free for Non-Commercial Purposes, which the licence defines as personal use, academic or scientific research, teaching, and use by a non-profit organisation or public body that is not acting in the course of a business, does not deliver a service for payment, and is not seeking commercial advantage.

What needs a commercial licence

Any other production use, including the delivery of health care or any other service for payment. Offering FerroFED, or a work derived from it, to third parties as a hosted, managed or embedded service through which others discover, query or exchange health records across organisations needs one in every case. So does selling, sublicensing or distributing it for a fee, on its own or inside another product.

A commercial licence starts with a conversation with the maintainer named in MAINTAINERS.md. The Licensor is Vernum Projecten B.V.

The change date

Each version becomes available under the Apache License 2.0 four years after that version is published. The licence calls that the Change License.

Contributions and third-party material

A contribution is licensed under the same licence. You keep your copyright, and you grant the Licensor the relicensing right in CONTRIBUTING.md § Licensing of contributions, recorded by a checkbox in the pull request. Vendored specifications and third-party material keep their upstream terms, recorded in a PROVENANCE.md beside each vendored tree.