Open Source and the AGPL

Karmyq's manifesto makes a promise: "Every line of code is public. Fork it, improve it, make it yours." A license is what turns that from a sentiment into something you can rely on.

Karmyq is licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later — the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or any later version. The full text lives in LICENSE at the root of the repository.

What you may do

Everything you would expect from free software, and the license guarantees it rather than merely permitting it this year:

• Run it. For yourself, for a neighbourhood, for a city, commercially or not. No fee, no permission, no usage limit.
• Read it. All of it. There is no hidden core.
• Change it. Fork it and take it somewhere we never imagined.
• Share it. Give copies away, or charge for them.

What you owe in return

One thing, and it is the point of choosing this license: if you give people your modified Karmyq, you give them your modifications too — under the same license.

Under most open-source licenses that obligation stops at distribution. If you never hand anyone a copy of the software, you never have to hand anyone the source. Running it as a website is not distribution, so a company can take an MIT-licensed project, improve it privately, run it as a service for millions of people, and owe nothing back.

The AGPL closes exactly that gap. Its section 13 says that if people interact with your modified version over a network, they are entitled to its source code. That is what separates it from the permissive alternatives we actually weighed — MIT, Apache-2.0 and BSD — none of which ask anything of a company running a modified copy as a service. It is not the only license with a network clause; other copyleft licenses reach network use too. It is the one that fits Karmyq, and the network-use condition is the whole reason for picking it.

So, concretely:

If you…	You must…
Run Karmyq unmodified, for anyone	Nothing beyond keeping the license and copyright notices
Modify it and keep it to yourself	Nothing
Modify it and give someone a copy	Offer them your modified source, under AGPL-3.0-or-later
Modify it and run it as a service others use	Offer those users your modified source, under AGPL-3.0-or-later

You can charge money for any of it. Copyleft is about the source staying available, not about software being free of charge.

Why this license and not a simpler one

Karmyq's claim is that "the infrastructure for cooperation should belong to everyone." MIT and Apache-2.0 are excellent licenses, and under either of them that sentence would not have been true: someone could run a closed, improved Karmyq as a service and the commons would get nothing back. The manifesto would have described a hope rather than a mechanism.

Network copyleft is the mechanism. It is what makes "if someone runs Karmyq, their changes stay open too" a fact about the license rather than a request.

The -or-later part follows the Free Software Foundation's recommendation: if a future AGPLv4 fixes something the current version gets wrong, adopting it does not require tracking down every past contributor.

If you are forking

Keep the LICENSE file and the copyright notice, license your changes under AGPL-3.0-or-later, and if you run your fork as a service, make its source available to the people using it. Publishing your fork on a public host is the easiest way to satisfy that — and it is what makes forks useful to everyone else rather than only to you.

Beyond that: the project is genuinely yours to take somewhere new. That is what the license is for.

If you are contributing

CONTRIBUTING.md states it directly: contributions are licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later. There is no separate contributor agreement and no copyright assignment — your work stays yours, under the same terms as everyone else's.

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This page summarizes the license in plain language. The LICENSE file is the actual legal terms, and it governs where the two differ. The reasoning behind the choice is recorded in ADR-092.