AGPLv3 and commercial usage

Hi, I didn’t find any information about commercial usage of the broker on your website or the forum. As I understand it, we as a company would have to open our code to our users if our software talks to the Zeebe Broker. Your github page says:

Most Zeebe source files are made available under the Apache License, Version 2.0 except for the broker-core component. The broker-core source files are made available under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPLv3). See individual source files for details.

I guess the reason is that you want to sell special licenses for closed source - and probably commercial - software projects. Unfortunately, on your website I didn’t find any information regarding this topic. How can we use Zeebe as a company with closed sourced projects?

Best,
Hannes

Hi Hannes,
Zeebe is still a tech preview and not yet meant for production use. Once Zeebe has achieved production-readiness, as an end user, you will be able to use Zeebe without any impact by the AGPL since you will only embedd the client in your application (which is Apache 2.0 licensed) not the broker. In case you want to build your own product on top of Zeebe and make changes to the broker or expose Zeebe’s API as a managed service, then you would not be able to do this without making your product open source as well. (This is the same for Mongo DB, BTW.) On top of this, once Zeebe reaches production readyness, Camunda will also offer commercial services and dual-licensing around Zeebe…
Cheers
Uli (Legal@Camunda)

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