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Fair-code FAQ

What is "fair-code"?​

Fair-code is source code that:

  • Is freely available
  • Can be modified and self-hosted
  • Has restrictions on commercial use by third parties

It's not OSI-approved "open source", but it preserves most of the freedoms developers care about — auditing, contributing, self-hosting.

What can I do?​

✅ Self-host Bee Flow for your own company / non-profit / personal use, free of charge.

✅ Modify the source. Fork the repos. Submit PRs.

✅ Use it commercially inside your organisation — to serve your own employees / customers via your own product.

✅ Audit every line of code that runs against your data.

✅ Sub-licence Bee Flow to your customers if you have a Full tier licence (license_issuance feature).

✅ Embed Bee Flow chat in another product you ship internally.

What can't I do?​

❌ Run Bee Flow as a paid SaaS for third parties (e.g. spinning up "Acme Bee Flow" and reselling it). Not without a commercial agreement.

❌ Use the "Bee Flow" name or bee logo on a fork — those are trademarks of Bee Flow B.V.

❌ Strip the licence headers / attribution from source files.

❌ Fork the licence text itself and call it something else.

Why not pure AGPL or MIT?​

  • MIT would let competitors take the code and resell Bee Flow as their own SaaS — that funds nothing back into the project.
  • AGPL requires anyone hosting a modified version to publish their changes, which scares off enterprise self-hosters who can't legally publish their internal patches.

The Sustainable Use Licence threads the needle: maximally permissive for end-users and self-hosters, narrowly restricted on third-party SaaS resale.

Why is the connector AGPL-3.0?​

The Nextcloud App Store requires AGPL or compatible licences. The connector is a thin proxy + lifecycle bridge — small enough that AGPL's "publish your modifications" obligation is fine for a Bee Flow fork to comply with.

Is the SUL OSI-approved?​

No. SUL is fair-code, not OSS. We picked fair-code consciously — see "Why not pure AGPL or MIT?" above. n8n, Plausible and several others use the same model.

Can I use Bee Flow inside a commercial product I sell?​

✅ Yes, if Bee Flow runs inside your customer's environment (you ship them an installable that they self-host, and you charge for support / customisation). The end-user is your customer; you're not running a Bee Flow SaaS.

❌ No, if you stand up a single instance of Bee Flow and charge multiple unrelated customers per-seat to use it. That's resale; you need a commercial agreement.

If unsure, email tomkooy@beeflow.nl with a description and we'll respond within a couple of business days.

Can I contribute?​

Yes — bug reports, feature requests and PRs are welcome on GitHub. By submitting a contribution, you agree to license it under the same terms as the project (SUL for hive / beeflow, AGPL for connector).

What about the docs repo?​

This documentation site is CC-BY-4.0 (prose) + MIT (code samples). Reuse freely with attribution.

Where can I see the licence text?​

Can I deploy a fork under a different name?​

Yes — you must rename it (drop "Bee Flow" and the bee mark) and remove our trademarks from the UI. Otherwise yes, free to ship.

Where do I email about licensing?​

tomkooy@beeflow.nl — we'll respond within 2 business days. For commercial / resale enquiries please mention your use case and expected scale.

What's the relationship to n8n's licence?​

Both are fair-code under the umbrella concept of the Sustainable Use Licence. The text in our repos is our own; we don't reference n8n in it. If you've used n8n's licence, the same intuitions apply: free for self-host, paid for resale.

What happens if Bee Flow B.V. goes away?​

The code is already public on GitHub. Existing self-hosted deployments keep running. Existing licence keys keep working through their exp (refresh check is non-fatal — see Apply). The trademark would need a new owner; the source can be forked under a different name.