Fair Source Licensing Explained

OpenHelm is released under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL 1.1) — a Fair Source license. If you haven't encountered this before, it's worth understanding what it means in practice, because it affects how you can use and contribute to OpenHelm.

What Is Fair Source?

Fair Source is an emerging category of software licensing that sits between fully open source and fully proprietary. The core idea: source code is available and inspectable, most uses are free, but commercial use that competes with the project requires a commercial license.

The Business Source License 1.1, authored by MariaDB, formalizes this model. HashiCorp's products (Vault, Terraform) use it. Sentry uses it. GitLab has used similar models. It's a battle-tested approach for sustaining commercially-developed software.

What BSL 1.1 Means for OpenHelm

Under OpenHelm's BSL 1.1 license, you can:

• Download, inspect, and run OpenHelm for personal use
• Use OpenHelm in your own projects, including commercial projects (as a user, not as a distributor)
• Contribute code back to the project
• Fork the project for non-competing purposes
• Study the source to understand how it works

You cannot (without a commercial license):

• Offer OpenHelm as a hosted service to others
• Build a competing product using OpenHelm's source
• Redistribute OpenHelm as part of a commercial product

The conversion clause: After 4 years from each release date, OpenHelm's source automatically converts to the Apache 2.0 license — fully open source. This is the defining feature of BSL 1.1. No lock-in forever.

Why Not MIT?

The honest answer is sustainability. MIT-licensed projects can be taken, productized, and sold without contributing back anything — not code, not funding, not acknowledgment. For a small team building developer tools that require ongoing maintenance, that model makes it difficult to sustain the work.

We looked at the history of well-known MIT projects that were forked by cloud providers into competing products, and decided we didn't want to follow that path.

Why Not Fully Proprietary?

Because trust matters. When your development tools run AI agents on your code, you need to be able to audit what they're doing. A closed-source tool that runs code on your projects is a liability, not an asset.

Fair Source gives us the ability to sustain the project commercially while keeping the source open for inspection, contribution, and eventual full open-sourcing.

What It Means for Contributors

Contributions to OpenHelm are welcome and appreciated. Contributors retain copyright on their work, but by submitting a PR, you agree that your contribution may be used under the same BSL 1.1 terms (and will eventually become Apache 2.0 when the conversion period ends).

We're working on a formal Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for significant contributions. Until then, the above applies.

Questions We Hear

"Can I use OpenHelm at work?"

Yes. Using OpenHelm as a tool in your work is not restricted. The restrictions apply to building competing products or offering it as a service.

"Can my company self-host OpenHelm?"

Yes — this is what the Business tier covers. Self-hosting for your team's internal use is permitted and supported.

"Will OpenHelm ever become open source?"

Yes — by the terms of BSL 1.1, each version of OpenHelm becomes Apache 2.0 four years after its release. We expect to accelerate that timeline as the business becomes sustainable.

If you have specific questions about licensing that aren't answered here, reach out via our contact page.