Licensing & BSL

Agora is source-available (BSL) — it is not open source. The Business Source License 1.1 is not an OSI-approved open source license; the full terms are at mariadb.com/bsl11.

What you can do

You are free to self-host Agora, use it internally for development, evaluation, and your own production workloads, and modify the source.

The restriction (today)

You may not offer Agora itself, or a product derived from it, to third parties as a hosted or managed orchestration / agent-dispatch service. In plain terms: you can run it for yourself; you cannot productise it as a service you sell or provide to others. The LICENSE file is always the authoritative statement of what is and isn’t permitted — this page is a plain-language summary, not the grant.

Embedding Agora in a product you ship?

If you’re building Agora into a product or service delivered to third parties — hosted or self-hosted — get in touch about commercial licensing. It keeps you on solid footing as the project’s grant evolves toward a clean “free to build, pay to ship” line, and it’s how the engine stays sustainably maintained. Talk to us about a commercial license or pilot →.

When does it convert?

On the Change Date (2030-06-01) each version of Agora automatically converts to the Apache License, Version 2.0, which is a standard permissive open source license.

Policy note: the Change Date advances with major releases per BSL customary practice; the date stated in LICENSE is always the authoritative value (currently 2030-06-01, four years from first publish).

Full terms

See the LICENSE file in this repository, which incorporates the Business Source License 1.1 by reference from mariadb.com/bsl11, together with the Parameters (Licensor, Licensed Work, Additional Use Grant, Change Date, and Change License) stated there.

Why BSL? (the rationale)

agora was first licensed under the Functional Source License 1.1, MIT Future License (FSL-1.1-MIT). The offload V1 work swapped it to BSL 1.1 (ADR-0017). The decision turned on adoption friction for the users V1 targets: self-hosters and security/compliance-conscious teams running agents against their own repos, credentials, and regulated data.

FSL’s “Competing Use” restriction is broad and somewhat fuzzy. A company with an internal agent platform has to stop and ask “is this a competing use?” — and that hesitation is exactly where an evaluation stalls.
BSL’s restriction is narrow and explicit: the Additional Use Grant forbids only offering Agora (or a derivative) as a hosted or managed orchestration / agent-dispatch service. A team evaluating Agora to run their own agents reads that and immediately knows they’re clear.
BSL is the recognized incumbent (MariaDB, CockroachDB, Sentry, HashiCorp) — lower legal-review friction than the newer FSL.
BSL’s “no hosted service” line maps onto the architecture already built: the §10.6 client/service privilege split is the commercial boundary, and the future hosted multi-tenant control plane is the service side.

The trade-off, taken deliberately: BSL (with our grant) offers less aggressive competitive protection than FSL and a longer closed horizon (4 years → Apache-2.0 versus FSL’s 2 years → MIT). For an early-stage project optimizing for getting real users, reducing evaluation friction beats maximizing protection.

All public copy says “source-available (BSL)” — never “open source,” because BSL is not OSI-approved.