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Licensing

Exepad is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (LICENSE). This page explains what that means in practice, and states two things the licence text alone does not.

The short version

You What applies
Run Exepad, modified or not, for yourself or your company Nothing to do. Use it.
Build apps with Exepad and ship them to customers The apps are yours. No obligation. See below.
Modify Exepad itself and run it as a service others use Offer those users the source of your modified Exepad (AGPL §13).
Redistribute Exepad, modified or not Ship it under AGPL-3.0 with the source.
Cannot comply with AGPL for policy reasons Talk to us about a commercial licence.
Fork it and ship your own build Fine — rename the product. The Exepad name and logo are reserved under §7(e); see TRADEMARK.md.

Applications you build with Exepad are yours

Exepad LLC claims no ownership of, and no copyright interest in, the applications you build with Exepad — including code the agent generates on your instance at your direction. They are your work. You own them, you license them however you like, and you owe nothing to this project for them.

This is not merely our policy; it also reflects how the software is built. A generated application is compiled as a separate module that contains none of Exepad's source code. The bundler marks the Exepad SDK and React as external (packages/deploy-utils/src/bundle/components.ts), so the compiled artifact keeps a bare import … from "@exepad/sdk" reference, which the host runtime resolves at load time through an import map (apps/runtime/client/index.html). Your app calls Exepad. It does not contain Exepad.

Exporting a project is the exception, and it puts three kinds of Exepad code in your download so the result builds and runs without an Exepad instance:

  • vendor/exepad-sdk/ — a built copy of the SDK;
  • server/start.mjs — a built copy of the app backend, when your app has one;
  • the project scaffolding — src/exepad-host.ts, src/App.tsx, src/main.tsx, src/components-manifest.ts, the Vite config, index.html and index.css.

The SDK and the backend bundle are Exepad's code and each ships with the licence notice beside it. The scaffolding carries none — it is generated for you to build on, and you may modify and license it as your own. None of the three pulls your application under AGPL. The permission below says all of this explicitly.

The other export — the run-ready deployable bundle — is different. It packs the entire Exepad runtime (app/server.mjs plus the compiled studio) as object code, and that is conveying Exepad itself: it ships under plain AGPL-3.0, with LICENSE and NOTICE at its root. The permission below does not extend to it. Only the app data inside it is yours.

Whether calling a library across that kind of boundary creates a "combined work" is a question reasonable lawyers answer differently. Rather than leave you to rely on our reading of it, we remove the question with an explicit grant:

Additional permission under GNU AGPL version 3, section 7

As an additional permission under section 7 of the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, Exepad LLC grants you permission to develop, run, convey, publicly perform and make available over a network any Application, and to license that Application under terms of your choosing.

"Application" means software authored by you, or generated on an Exepad instance at your direction, which is loaded and executed as a guest application by Exepad or by an exported Exepad project, and which interfaces with Exepad through the Exepad SDK (@exepad/sdk), the application configuration schema, or the documented component and handler interfaces.

This permission extends to conveying, together with your Application, the Exported Components that Exepad's own project-export ("eject") produces: an unmodified copy of the Exepad SDK, the built standalone backend bundle, and the project scaffolding it generates. You may do so without your Application becoming subject to the GNU Affero General Public License.

Exepad LLC further grants you permission to modify the generated project scaffolding and to license your modified version under terms of your choosing — it is emitted for you to build upon. The SDK and the backend bundle remain licensed under AGPL-3.0 and must be conveyed with their licence notice intact; this permission lets you ship them alongside your Application without relicensing your own work, and does not relicense theirs.

This additional permission applies to the Application and the Exported Components only. It does not permit conveying Exepad itself, or any modified version of the Exepad platform, the Exepad SDK or the backend bundle, under terms other than the GNU Affero General Public License version 3.

In plain terms: the interface is a permitted boundary. Build on it, keep your code closed, sell it. The only thing AGPL asks is that changes to Exepad itself stay open.

What AGPL actually requires

The obligation is narrower than most people assume. It is triggered by modifying and then conveying or network-serving Exepad, not by using it.

You owe nothing when you:

  • run Exepad — unmodified or modified — for yourself, your team or your company, however many people use the instance internally;
  • build applications with it and publish them, however commercial;
  • modify it privately and never let anyone outside use that modified version.

You owe source when you:

  • modify Exepad and let others interact with your modified Exepad over a network (§13) — you must offer those users the corresponding source of your modifications, under AGPL-3.0. This means the studio itself, not the apps built with it;
  • distribute Exepad, modified or not (§4–6) — ship it under AGPL-3.0.

"Corresponding source" means your modifications to Exepad, not your infrastructure, your data, your API keys or your users' applications.

The offer is already built in

Exepad serves its own §13 offer, so a fork is compliant by default rather than by remembering to be. Three surfaces carry it: GET /source redirects to the source repository, a <link rel="license"> is emitted into every served page, and the studio's About page shows the running version, commit and a source link.

All three read one value, so a fork repoints them in one place — no patching source. Set EXEPAD_SOURCE_URL at build time (a Docker build arg, wired through docker-compose.yml) to bake it into the studio bundle, and as an environment variable to repoint the server side at runtime. Leave it unset and it names this upstream repository.

Commercial licensing

If your organisation's policy prohibits AGPL software, Exepad LLC — as the copyright holder — can license the project under separate commercial terms. Contributors grant the rights that make this possible (CONTRIBUTING.md), and the AGPL-3.0 grant is irrevocable, so this option never removes anything from the open-source project.

Enquiries: info@exepad.com.

Third-party code

Components from other projects that are included in this source tree are listed with their licences in NOTICE. Dependencies installed from npm and PyPI are not vendored here; they carry their own licences and are declared in the package manifests.

This page describes the licence terms and is written to be read, not to replace them. Where it differs from LICENSE, the licence text governs. If you need certainty for your own situation, ask your own lawyer.