Open core & licensing
Olivares AI is open core. The complete Community product is released under the GNU
Affero General Public License. Its AGPL build is the complete product for one person
or one team, with unlimited users and one active identity provider (IdP). The commercial
enterprise/ line adds new code, built only with -tags enterprise and absent
from the public binary. Business includes four capability families in one
subscription. Enterprise covers negotiated scope. A commercial license provides
the legal exception to copyleft; nothing published open moves behind a paywall.
The license boundary
Section titled “The license boundary”Licensing follows the source tree. Every file carries an SPDX header, and the boundary is enforced in CI (a connector may never import the engine):
| Path | License | What it is |
|---|---|---|
core/ |
AGPL-3.0-only | the engine: ingest, event bus, data model, module runtime, API, authz, audit |
modules/ |
AGPL-3.0-only | the 32 modules (inventory, the R/RW map, FinOps, evals, guardrails, …) |
web/ |
AGPL-3.0-only | the React UI |
sdk/ |
Apache-2.0 | the connector/module interfaces, the gRPC contract and the shared types |
connectors/ |
Apache-2.0 | the connectors (Claude, OpenAI, pgAudit, eBPF, cloud, Slack, SIEM, …) |
enterprise/ |
commercial | additive modules, build-tag gated, never in the public binary (LicenseRef-Olivares-Commercial) |
The documentation site you are reading is part of the AGPL product. Which capability is
in which edition is written in one place, docs/editions.md in the repository; this page does
not repeat it.
What this means for you
Section titled “What this means for you”- Self-hosting the product (AGPL). You can run, study, modify and redistribute the complete product under the AGPL. The AGPL’s network-use clause applies: if you offer a modified version to others over a network, you must offer them your modified source. For internal self-hosting this is rarely an issue; if you want to build a product on top of Olivares AI without that obligation, the commercial license exists for exactly that.
- Building connectors (Apache-2.0). The SDK and connectors are Apache-2.0 — permissive, no copyleft. You can write a connector, keep it proprietary, and ship it however you like. The architectural boundary that makes this safe is enforced: an Apache-2.0 connector never imports the AGPL engine; it depends only on the SDK. That keeps the connector ecosystem free of copyleft friction.
- A commercial license. Organizations that need an exception to the AGPL obligations can contact enterprise@olivares.ai for a commercial agreement. Business includes the four capability families below in one subscription. Enterprise terms are negotiated; families are not sold separately.
Editions and pricing
Section titled “Editions and pricing”| Edition | Price | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Community | Free, AGPL-3.0-only | Unlimited users; one active identity provider (IdP). |
| Business | USD 99/month or USD 990/year | Unlimited users; one legal entity; one active instance at a time. |
| Enterprise | Contact us | Terms agreed in a contract and the capabilities that depend on them: multi-entity scope, additional deployments or IdPs, air-gap mirrors, custom LTS, and scoped upstream credentials minted by OAuth 2.0 token exchange (RFC 8693). |
Business includes Regulated Operations, AI Runtime Security, Compliance Packs, and Identity & Scale. Each family keeps its own code and license-grant boundary. You can enable or disable each family; none is sold separately. Private implementation is distributed as commercial binaries, outside the public repository.
Can I buy a capability family separately?
Section titled “Can I buy a capability family separately?”No. The four named families are included in the Business subscription. Choose monthly or annual billing at Pricing.
What if I need more than one active instance?
Section titled “What if I need more than one active instance?”Contact enterprise@olivares.ai for Enterprise scope. A Business license is active on one instance at a time; you release it and activate it on another instance as often as you need. Enterprise covers several active instances.
What is open vs commercial
Section titled “What is open vs commercial”The open binary is the complete product for one person or one team; the commercial
(enterprise/) line is additive. FinOps budgets and spend analysis, compliance
frameworks and reports, SIEM push and active-passive HA leader routing are Business: the
open build refuses them and names Business (an API route answers 501, a CLI command exits
with code 9, an HA leader-routing switch stops the server from starting). Two boundaries are
worth calling out because the open build answers for them honestly rather than faking them:
- SSO — single-IdP login (OIDC + SAML 2.0) is open in the default binary:
real login, no
-tags enterprise. Several active IdPs (per-tenant / by-domain), login-time group mapping, require-SSO and the inbound SCIM server are Business (Identity & Scale); activating a second active IdP returnsmulti_idp_requires_enterprise. - User accounts — unlimited in every edition. The community build has no user cap, and neither has the commercial one: no license state (valid, expired, absent) can limit how many accounts a deployment runs. The cap of three active accounts that shipped before 2026-07-27 was removed outright; the seat seam remains in the code as a compatibility no-op that refuses nothing, and a license lapse never caps, disables or deletes an account.
See Honesty & limits for the full open-vs-commercial picture.
The license key never gates the open product
Section titled “The license key never gates the open product”This is important and deliberate: in the open (AGPL) binary, license validation is
attestation only. The engine records who holds a license and its status; it
never disables, degrades or blocks any request, any module, or boot on a
license check, and it runs offline (an Ed25519 signature, no license server),
which is why the open product works air-gapped. The one place the license is
consumed rather than displayed is the closed commercial build, and only to entitle
the modules the commercial agreement covers, evaluated per module — a local decision
in the commercial edition, never a check in the open binary. It never caps users: accounts are unlimited in every edition. So the open
build is complete for one person or one team and uncapped-by-license; what differs in the commercial
edition is the additive commercial (enterprise/) modules, not a license key flipping features
on inside the same binary.
Why this model
Section titled “Why this model”Crippling the core was rejected: the open edition does the whole job for one person or one team, so capping it would make it a worse product and erode trust. Permissive-everything (MIT/Apache on the core) would give the core away with no commercial footing. Source-available, non-OSS licenses (BSL, SSPL and similar) would kill the open-source adoption that is the whole point of an extensible connector ecosystem. So the model is open core: a copyleft product that is complete and credible on its own, a permissive SDK that keeps the connector ecosystem frictionless, and a small additive commercial line of new code that was never in the open build — plus a clean commercial exception — without ever degrading what you can self-host.
Contributing
Section titled “Contributing”Contributions are accepted under the project’s contribution terms (the repository
ships both a DCO and a CLA, plus a trademark policy). See the repository’s
CONTRIBUTING guide for the current process.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Install a license — where a purchased license goes, and the in-place Community → Business swap. This page explains the model; that one is the steps.
- Security model — why attestation-only licensing matters for an air-gapped security product.