# Licensing

Cognipeer Console is published in this repository under the **GNU Affero General Public License v3.0**.

That choice is intentional:

- It keeps the community edition genuinely open and auditable.
- It allows commercial use, paid support, and hosted offerings by Cognipeer.
- It requires users who modify the software and make it available over a network to share those modifications under the same license.

## What AGPL Means In Practice

You may:

- run Cognipeer Console for internal or commercial purposes,
- charge for hosting, support, integration, migration, or consulting,
- modify the codebase for your own deployments,
- redistribute the original or modified project under AGPL terms.

You must:

- keep copyright and license notices intact,
- provide source code for AGPL-covered modifications when you distribute the software,
- provide source code for AGPL-covered modifications when you offer the modified service over a network,
- preserve the same AGPL terms for downstream recipients of the community edition.

## Commercial Options

Cognipeer may offer separate commercial terms for teams that need one or more of the following:

- closed-source redistribution,
- proprietary OEM or embedded use,
- managed SaaS terms outside AGPL reciprocity,
- contractual support, SLA, onboarding, or enterprise deployment assistance.

See [COMMERCIAL.md](../../COMMERCIAL.md) for the repository-level summary.

## Hosted Service Versus Community Edition

This repository documents the community edition source tree. Managed or enterprise offerings can differ in:

- hosting and operational responsibilities,
- support commitments,
- pricing and contractual terms,
- access to private deployment automation or enterprise-only deliverables.

## Trademarks

The AGPL license covers source code. It does **not** automatically grant trademark rights to use the Cognipeer name, logos, or branding for derivative hosted services or redistributed products.

If you redistribute or operate a derivative, keep branding and trademark usage aligned with the terms communicated by Cognipeer.

## Choosing This Model

If your goal is to:

- publish the code publicly on GitHub,
- accept outside contributions,
- keep community modifications open,
- and still sell support, hosting, or commercial licenses,

AGPL is a defensible default.

## Legal Note

This page is an engineering-facing summary, not legal advice. If you are making a redistribution, SaaS, OEM, or procurement decision, have counsel review the full [LICENSE](../../LICENSE).