Why AGPL

Stowage is licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later. This page explains the choice in plain English. The legal text is in LICENSE; the project's own copy of this rationale is in LICENSE.md.

#What this means in practice

For self-hosters and homelab operators. Run Stowage on your own infrastructure for any purpose, including commercial use. You are not required to publish anything. The AGPL only adds obligations if you modify Stowage and expose those modifications to other users over a network.

For internal tools at companies. Same as above. Running an unmodified Stowage as an internal dashboard for your team is not "conveying" the software in the sense the AGPL cares about. If you fork it and add private features that only your employees use internally, the AGPL also does not require you to publish those changes.

For SaaS / managed-service operators. If you offer Stowage to users over a network and you have modified it, you must publish those modifications under AGPL-3.0-or-later. This is the clause that closes the gap the GPL leaves open. It exists deliberately.

For contributors. Contributions are accepted under the same license as the project, certified through a Developer Certificate of Origin (see CONTRIBUTING.md). Copyright in your contribution remains yours; you license it to the project rather than transferring it.

#Why this license, specifically

Stowage exists in part because in May 2025, MinIO removed administrative features from the open-source MinIO Console and moved them behind a commercial product. The community's reaction was about trust as much as features — the change happened without warning, in what was described as a bug-fix release.

Stowage's positioning is the inverse: a backend-agnostic dashboard that won't be quietly stripped down later.

A copyleft license is the structural commitment that makes that positioning credible. A permissive license (MIT, Apache) would let any vendor — including the next MinIO — fork Stowage, embed it in a paid product, and starve the upstream. AGPL prevents that, both for distributed builds and for managed-service offerings.

The "or later" suffix means future FSF revisions of the AGPL are automatically acceptable, without requiring a relicensing exercise.

#What this is not

This is not a "source-available" license. It is OSI-approved open source. The Open Source Initiative recognises AGPL-3.0 as conforming to the Open Source Definition. Stowage is not under the SSPL, the BSL, the Elastic License, or any other restricted license that loses OSI approval.

#Future commercial licensing

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. The paragraph is here so the option is documented.

#Decision tree

Will you run Stowage?
├── On your own hardware, for your own purposes
│   ├── Modified or unmodified?
│   │   ├── Either way: no publication obligation. ✅
├── Inside a company, for your colleagues
│   ├── Modified or unmodified?
│   │   ├── Either way: no publication obligation. ✅
├── Offered over a network to outside users (SaaS)
│   ├── Unmodified
│   │   ├── No source-publication obligation; you must still convey the
│   │   │   AGPL itself with the offering. ✅
│   ├── Modified
│   │   ├── You must publish your modifications under AGPL-3.0-or-later. ⚠️
│   │   │   Either contribute them upstream or host a public source repo.

#What you don't need to do

• You don't have to sign a CLA.
• You don't have to transfer copyright.
• You don't have to register your deployment with anyone.
• You don't have to phone home — Stowage doesn't.