Licensing, Transparency, and Sustainability

We’re building Archodex because we love helping people improve the resilience of their systems and simplify work for teams that operate them. We further aim to do so for as many people as we can over a long time horizon. Along the way, we plan to be as transparent and open as possible.

To do this sustainably as a small team, we’ve adopted a licensing strategy that balances three goals:

• Impact — by making Archodex available to as many people as possible, especially individuals and small teams for free
• Transparency — by publishing our code for inspection, self‑hosting, and sharing of knowledge
• Sustainability — by ensuring we can continue improving Archodex with a reasonable revenue stream in both the short and long term

Archodex software is released under the Fair Core License – MIT (FCL‑1.0‑MIT)¹ to meet these goals. We are a small team trying to strike a fair balance between freedom and sustainability, and we aim to earn your trust by being transparent from the start.

Fair Source Licensing

The Fair Core License – MIT (FCL‑1.0‑MIT) is part of the emerging Fair Source movement. Fair Source licenses strike a balance between providing as much freedom as possible for users while protecting our ability to sustain the project long-term for ongoing improvements.

Under the Fair Core License, you can:

• Inspect our codebase, including our registry of detection rules.
• Use, modify, and self‑host Archodex for your personal or organizational use, including in production.
• Fork and redistribute the software for yourself and for others.
• Use our patented technologies that we have invested research and development into for Archodex.

To ensure we are able to sustain ongoing research and development of Archodex the license prohibits you from:

• Redistributing Archodex source code in a competing product or service.
• Bypassing or disabling the license key enforcement that governs usage limits.

After two years, each release of Archodex software may also be used, modified, and redistributed under the MIT license. The MIT license is an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved Open Source license.

Patents

Archodex software is also protected by patent technology. Unlike copyright licenses, which determine how you can re-use and redistribute the exact source code you are using, patents cover concepts and techniques that are implemented by the software. Through the Fair Core License we provide you a patent grant that allows you to use our patent concepts and techniques in Archodex software, again with prohibitions on:

• Redistributing Archodex source code in a competing product or service.
• Bypassing or disabling the license key enforcement that governs usage limits.

As stated in the Fair Source Licensing section above, after two years each release of software may be used, modified, and redistributed under the MIT license. The MIT license does not include a patent grant. This means that after two years of each release of Archodex software you can re-use and redistribute pieces of the Archodex code, but you cannot re-use or redistribute the entire software under the MIT license alone because it would implement our patent concepts and techniques.

For example, the Archodex Agent is covered by patent technology that orchestrates the eBPF programs that monitor encrypted network traffic. But pieces of the code can still be re-used after two years under the terms of the MIT license. You could re-use the Archodex Agent’s Golang PC Line Table parser code in another project under the MIT license, as long as that other project does not re-implement the orchestration of eBPF probes as claimed in our patents.

To summarize, after two years from each release of Archodex software you may choose either of the following paths for re-use:

1. Continue using Archodex under the original Fair Core License (with its patent grant).
2. Use any parts of the code under the terms of the MIT license as long as the resulting software does not reimplement our patent concepts and techniques.

Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

We require contributions to our codebases to be made under the Archodex Contributor License Agreement (CLA). The use of a CLA is common among Open Source / Fair Source software projects. The Archodex CLA ensures that we can continue to make future Archodex releases by protecting against changes in copyright ownership for past contributions, among other concerns. The first time you open a GitHub Pull Request against an Archodex repository we will ask you to accept our CLA.

Frequently Asked Questions