Mullet is free for your company

I changed Mullet’s licence today. The old wording said one developer could use it free, on one running instance. The new wording is simpler and a lot more open.

What you can do

Under the Business Source License 1.1, you may use Mullet in production, free, for any purpose:

• on your own, or inside a company or team;
• on any number of machines;
• to build software you sell or ship.

You may also copy, change and redistribute it, as before.

What it doesn’t cover

One thing: offering Mullet, or a service whose value comes substantially from it, to other people as a hosted, managed or embedded service. An API or a platform that runs Mullet’s job runner or search for its customers is the example in the licence. That needs a commercial licence, and the licence says how to ask.

Each version becomes Apache 2.0 on 3 April 2030, or four years after its first public release if that comes sooner. That date and the Apache terms haven’t changed.

Why

The old wording was a bad fit for what people actually do. “One individual developer” ruled out a team that wanted to try it at work, and “one running instance” is hard to apply to a tool that is a job runner, a server and some timers, run from more than one machine. I’d have turned away exactly the people most likely to tell me what is wrong with it.

I want more people using Mullet, not fewer. A company running it on its own repos takes nothing from me. The only use I want to keep is the one a source-available licence is for: somebody else selling a hosted Mullet.

Contributing

If you send code, you sign each commit off (git commit -s), which says you wrote it or may submit it. You also grant me the right to use and sublicense your contribution under the licence and under any other licence I choose, including Apache 2.0. That is what keeps a commercial licence possible for the one case above. It is a lighter arrangement than a contributor licence agreement, and if outside contributions grow I may need something heavier.

This is a plain-English account, not legal advice. The wording that counts is in the repository’s LICENSE, and the README has the short version. I’ve updated the Mullet page to match.