For AI agents: a documentation index is available at /llms.txt. A markdown version of this page is available at /guide/community/project/licence.md.
Licence
The Community Edition is GNU AGPL v3.0 — what that permits and what it obliges.
Orangescrum Community Edition is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.
Not legal advice
This page summarises the licence in plain terms. The full text is what governs, and if the distinction matters to your business, talk to a lawyer.
#What you may do
Run it inside a business, for profit, at any scale. No fee, no seat count.
Change anything. Fork it. Strip parts out.
Share the original or your modified version.
Purely internal use with no obligation to publish anything.
#What you must do
The AGPL's distinguishing clause is section 13, the network clause:
Offering it over a network counts as distribution
If you modify Orangescrum and let people use it over a network — even without shipping them any files — you must offer those users the complete source of your modified version. This is what separates the AGPL from the ordinary GPL, where private SaaS use creates no obligation.
Concretely:
| Obligation | Detail |
|---|---|
| Publish source | Modified versions offered over a network must have their source available to those users |
| Same licence | Derivative works must also be AGPL v3.0 |
| State changes | Say what you modified |
| Keep notices | Retain copyright and licence notices |
#Does this affect me?
We run it unmodified for our own team
No obligation to publish anything. Using the software — modified or not — purely internally does not trigger section 13, and unmodified use triggers nothing at all.
We modified it for our own team only
Section 13 is about users interacting with it over a network. Your own employees using your internal instance are such users — the safe reading is that you must make the modified source available to them. In practice that is a repository they can reach.
We want to offer it to customers as a hosted service
Then you must publish your modified source to those customers under the AGPL. If that is unacceptable, you need a commercial licence — talk to Orangescrum.
We want to build a proprietary product on top
The AGPL does not permit that. A commercial licence does.
#Why dual licensing exists
Andolasoft Inc. distributes both this AGPL edition and a commercially licensed edition from a shared codebase. That is why contributions require a CLA — the company needs permission to use contributed code in both. You keep the copyright to your work.
#Trademarks
The licence covers the code, not the name. "Orangescrum" and its logo are trademarks. A fork must not present itself as Orangescrum in a way that implies endorsement.
#Commercial licensing
If the AGPL does not fit — you need to build something proprietary, or offer a hosted service without publishing your changes — a commercial licence is available.