Why We Open-Sourced InfraPilot Under AGPL-3.0

The Open-Source Licensing Landscape

When we decided to open-source InfraPilot, we spent two weeks debating licensing. The options broadly fall into three camps:

• Permissive (MIT, Apache 2.0): Anyone can use, modify, and redistribute — including building proprietary products on top of your work
• Copyleft (GPL, AGPL): Derivatives must also be open-source under the same license
• Source-available (BUSL, Commons Clause): Code is visible but not truly open — commercial use restricted

We chose AGPL-3.0. Here's the reasoning.

The Problem with MIT for Infrastructure Tools

MIT is wonderful for libraries and frameworks. When React or Lodash is MIT-licensed, every company using it benefits and the ecosystem grows. The license works because the primary value is in the library, not the hosted service built on top.

Infrastructure tools are different. A company can take an MIT-licensed monitoring platform, wrap it in a proprietary cloud service, and sell it — contributing nothing back to the project that made it possible. This is what happened to Elasticsearch (leading to the SSPL license) and MongoDB (leading to similar restrictions).

We didn't want InfraPilot to follow that path.

Why Not GPL Instead of AGPL?

Standard GPL has a well-known loophole for SaaS: if you run GPL software on a server and offer it as a service (without distributing the binary), you don't have to share your modifications. This "ASP loophole" is precisely what AGPL was designed to close.

AGPL adds one key requirement: if you run a modified version of InfraPilot as a network service, you must make the source of your modifications available to users of that service. This means large cloud providers can't quietly fork InfraPilot, add features, and offer it commercially without contributing back.

What This Means for Self-Hosters

If you self-host InfraPilot for your own infrastructure, AGPL is completely transparent to you. You can use it, modify it, run it internally — no restrictions. AGPL only comes into play when you distribute software or offer it as a service to others.

The Community Edition is free forever for personal and commercial self-hosting use.

Our Business Model

We sustain development through Professional and Enterprise licenses — additional features, support SLAs, and managed cloud options. This is the open-core model: the powerful core is AGPL, the additional enterprise features are commercially licensed.

We believe this is the most honest version of "open source as a business": the core is genuinely free and open, the business model is transparent, and large companies who want to build commercial products on top either contribute back or license commercially. Everyone's incentives are aligned.