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Why Gantry is licensed under PolyForm Internal Use

Gantry is closed-source source-available commercial software. If you buy Gantry you also get the full source code and you can run it, or modified versions of it, for your own internal use, including for commercial purposes, without time limit.

When I started toying with the idea of making Gantry a commercial project, I had to come up with a licensing arrangement that made sense to me. I did not want to give Gantry away for free. I was definitely not interested in running an open source project.

But I want paying customers to have access to the source code, so they can review it and modify it in any way they see fit. I don't mind if customers talk about what the find in the code, even in public. The only thing I want to stop people from doing is sharing or distributing binaries, source or derivatives.

I figure it's a simple and fair deal: If you want to use my software or see my code, you pay me. Once you pay, I try to restrict you as little as possible. If someone else wants access, they will pay for it just like you did.

Something like that was the basic idea I started out with.

As it turns out, this is very close to a standard license called PolyForm Internal Use. I had never heard about it, but as soon as I did, I picked it as the license for Gantry, both binaries and source code.

Here is the official page of the license:

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/internal-use/1.0.0