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No community edition

There is one Stowage. There is no separately-gated "free" tier and "enterprise" tier. Every feature in the codebase ships in the AGPL build:

  • The dashboard.
  • The share-link system.
  • The audit log + CSV export.
  • The embedded SigV4 proxy.
  • The Kubernetes operator with S3Backend and BucketClaim CRDs.
  • The starter Grafana dashboard.
  • Cross-backend transfers.
  • Per-bucket quotas.
  • Endpoint management at /admin/endpoints.
  • All current and future drivers under internal/backend/.

#What this means structurally

  • The maintainer holds copyright on original code.
  • Contributions arrive under DCO without copyright transfer (see CONTRIBUTING.md).
  • The license is AGPL-3.0-or-later, OSI-approved.

These three together make a "carve out a paid edition later" strategy hard. The maintainer would have to relicense future code (legal, but a one-way door for community trust) and contributors would have to re-sign new agreements (which most won't).

#What this means practically

  • The AGPL build will never be feature-stripped to push you toward a paid edition. The features you use today will remain available under the same license forever.
  • If a commercial license is ever offered, it will exist alongside the AGPL build, not instead of it.
  • Forks made today against the AGPL build will keep working under the AGPL even if the upstream changes its mind later.

#Why be explicit about this

A surprising number of projects declare themselves "open source" while structurally setting themselves up to pull a MinIO-Console move later. The pattern is well-known: start with a permissive or copyleft license, build a community, then relicense after the user base is captive.

Stowage's specific origin story (see Why AGPL) means the project has to be especially clear about what it won't do.

#What you should still verify

This document is a project commitment, not a contract. To verify:

  • Read LICENSE (the AGPL-3.0 text) and LICENSE.md (the project's own rationale).
  • Check CONTRIBUTING.md to see how contributions flow (DCO, no copyright transfer).
  • Look at the git log — there's no relicensing event in the history.

If any of these change in the future, the precedent is the change itself, not this page.

#Future commercial licensing — what's documented

The LICENSE.md file says:

The maintainer holds copyright on all original Stowage code, and contributions are accepted under DCO without copyright transfer. This preserves the option to offer commercial licenses to organisations that cannot adopt AGPL for policy reasons, without affecting the freely available AGPL-licensed version. No commercial license is offered today; this paragraph is here so the option is documented.

If a commercial license is offered later, it will be advertised publicly and will not feature-strip the AGPL build. Both license options would carry the same code; the commercial option would only relax the AGPL's "publish modifications when you offer the modified version over a network" clause for organisations that can't comply with it for policy reasons.