Gears under the Business Source License
This page covers the terms for the gears marked as commercial in the reference section. Each licensed component states its own terms.
fluxrig routes, transforms and observes protocol traffic across systems that were never designed to talk to each other. The engine, the SDK and the gears that make a deployment work are Apache 2.0, published at github.com/jaab-tech/fluxrig.
This page covers the gears published under the Business Source License 1.1: what you may do with them, and why that licence rather than another. It is not the only set of terms fluxrig uses. Each licensed component states its own.
What you may do
Without a commercial licence:
- Read the source. All of it. Something that sits in a path that cannot fail gets audited, and a binary you cannot read is a conversation that ends early.
- Copy, modify and redistribute it, and make any non-production use: development, testing, staging, evaluation or a demonstration.
What needs a licence
Production use, of any kind, at any scale, including for your own traffic. The clearest case is offering the Licensed Work to third parties as a product, a service, or a hosted offering, so that its value to them comes from the gear itself rather than from something you built on top of it and stand behind, but the licence does not stop there: any other production use needs one too.
If you are not sure what your use needs, ask before you deploy: we would rather have that conversation early than discover it later. To ask for a commercial licence, or anything in between, write through jaab.tech/contact.
The licence
Business Source License 1.1, with no Additional Use Grant. The base grant already gives away copying, modifying, redistributing and any non-production use, unconditionally and forever; nothing beyond that is free until a commercial licence adds it, and a commercial licence adds rights on top of the base grant rather than in place of it, so nothing free today becomes licensed later. Each release converts to the Apache License, Version 2.0, four years after it ships.
| Term | Value |
|---|---|
| Licence | Business Source License 1.1 (full text in LICENSE) |
| Additional Use Grant | None |
| Change Date | Four years after each release |
| Change Licence | Apache License, Version 2.0 |
The licence file
A commercial licence is a signed file the Mixer reads once, at start, and
reports on in its own log: who it is issued to, and which builds it covers.
Point the FLUXRIG_LICENSE_FILE environment variable at it before starting
the Mixer, or place it as fluxrig-license.json in the working directory
the Mixer starts in: unset, that is the only path checked, and it is fine
for it not to exist. Coverage is checked against the build date baked into
the binary, never against the clock, so a licence that lapses never stops a
binary that is already running: renewing it covers the builds made after it
lapsed rather than reaching back to change what already ran.
Because the check runs once at startup, replacing the file with a renewed one takes effect on the next restart, not on the process already running. Only the Mixer checks: a Rack cannot join a deployment without first enrolling through a Mixer, so checking there covers every Rack it ever connects, without repeating the same warning once per Rack.
When the file is missing, unreadable, or does not cover the build, the
Mixer logs a warning naming the commercial gears as running in evaluation
mode, and keeps running. The check reports; it does not enforce, and
nothing about the Mixer itself, the engine, or any other gear is affected.
The terms in LICENSE are the actual agreement regardless of what the file
says or whether one is present at all.
A renewed file, covering builds beyond one that is about to lapse, comes from the same place the licence itself does: jaab.tech/contact.
Licensed gears
| Gear | Since | Status |
|---|---|---|
sim_source (deterministic ISO8583 traffic generator) | v0.1.0 | Ships with fluxrig v0.11.0 |
sim_responder (authorizer simulator) | v0.1.0 | Ships with fluxrig v0.11.0 |
Source: fluxrig-ent/pkg/gears/. Documentation:
sim_source,
sim_responder,
simulation tutorial.