Open source. Fair source. Your choice.
The noo Fair Community License
We believe identity infrastructure should be transparent and inspectable. Our license makes noo free for personal and community use, while sustaining commercial development.
What you can do
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Use it for yourself or your household
Run noo on your own infrastructure for personal projects, home labs, or self-hosted setups — no restrictions.
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Deploy for your community
Nonprofits, government agencies, clubs, schools, open-source projects — any group united by a shared purpose can use noo at no cost.
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Read, modify, and contribute
The source code is fully available. Fork it, audit it, submit patches. Contributions back to the upstream project are encouraged.
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Accept donations for hosting costs
If you run noo for a community, you can accept donations to cover documented hosting costs — as long as payment isn't required for access.
What requires a commercial license
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Using noo in a for-profit business
If your company's employees, contractors, customers, or partners use noo, you need a commercial license. This is how we fund development.
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Offering noo as a paid service
Hosting noo for third parties as a commercial offering — whether as SaaS, managed service, or embedded in another product — requires a commercial license.
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Monetizing through ads or data
If your deployment generates revenue through advertising, data sales, or affiliate schemes, that falls outside the community license.
If you distribute or modify
Modified versions must be shared under the same license with full source code available — including build scripts and configuration. If you host a modified version, users must be able to download the source. Attribution to the noo project (like a "Powered by" notice) must remain visible.
This is a copyleft-style provision: improvements flow back to the community, and users always know what software they're running.
Why this license?
Most identity platforms are either fully proprietary or open-core with crippled community editions. We wanted something different: a license that keeps the source fully transparent, lets individuals and communities use it freely, but ensures that companies who build businesses on noo contribute back — either through code or through commercial licensing.
It's not OSI-approved open source, and we don't claim it is. It's fair source — you can read every line, run it yourself, and contribute to it. Commercial use simply requires a commercial relationship.
Read the full license
This page is a summary to help you understand the license. The actual legal terms are in the noo Fair Community License v1.0 included with the source code.
Questions about licensing?
Whether you're evaluating noo for your business or deploying it for a community, we're happy to help.