Licensing

The licensing model, briefly

RedScribe is source-available, not OSI-approved open source: the source is public and modifiable, but the license restricts commercial use.

• Free for personal and community/noncommercial use, under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 (LICENSE in the repo), permanently.
• Commercial use (including running it at a for-profit consultancy) requires a commercial license (COMMERCIAL-LICENSE.md in the repo).

Commercial use is free right now

As a kickstart for the community, a commercial license key is free for the first year, no payment required. Email redscribe.maintainer@proton.me for one. Priced tiers begin once RedScribe has been proven at the scale real enterprise engagements demand, and nothing about a key already issued during the free period changes retroactively once pricing starts.

Nothing is feature-gated, either way

Every RedScribe instance has every feature, whether or not anyone paid. A commercial license changes exactly one thing: a “Licensed to X” line in the app’s own footer, purely as attribution and never a technical restriction.

Activating a license key

If your organization has a commercial license, you’ll be given a license key, a signed, tamper-evident text string. Activate it from Licensing in the sidebar (/licensing/, Superadmin-only, licensing.manage): paste the key into the field and save.

Pasting an invalid, tampered, or expired-in-the-past key doesn’t error or break anything. It’s checked instantly, and the footer simply falls back to the plain, unlicensed display if it doesn’t verify.

What the footer shows

State	Footer	Also shown
No key entered	RedScribe v<version>	Nothing
Active (valid, not near expiry)	RedScribe v<version> — Licensed to <Org>	Nothing
Expiring soon (≤30 days left)	Same “Licensed to” line	An amber banner, Superadmin-only, across the whole app, saying your commercial license for <Org> expires in N days, with a Renew link.
Expired	RedScribe v<version> — License expired (<Org>)	A red banner, Superadmin-only

Expiry never blocks anything

An expired key is still a genuinely valid, authentically-signed key. It just stops being displayed as “currently licensed.” No feature is disabled, no workflow is blocked, and no one outside Superadmin ever sees an expiry banner. This is pure attribution, consistent with the no-feature-gating policy above. If your license has expired, contact whoever issued it for a renewed key. That’s an offline process outside RedScribe itself.