Licensing

Summary, not the licence

This is a plain-language summary. The licence text in the repository (LICENSE.md) is what applies, and the full explanation, including the commercial licence and third-party notices, is docs/product/licensing.md. Draft, not legal advice.

The whole opdns repository (the resolver, the control plane, the dashboard, the self-hosted node, and these docs) is published under the Source First License 1.1 (ADR 0019). It is source-available, not open source, and it never converts to an open-source licence.

You may

• Read, build, copy and modify the code.
• Run it, including the self-hosted node on your home network, for non-commercial purposes: personal use, research, experiment, testing, study, hobby projects.
• Share copies, modified or not, free of charge and for non-commercial purposes, with the licence included and a note that you changed it.

You may not, without a commercial licence

• Use it commercially. That includes a business running the node for its office, an IT contractor or MSP deploying it for clients, and offering opdns or a fork as a hosted service, even internally and even for free.
• Sell copies or include them in anything commercial.
• Remove licence or copyright notices.

A claim that the software infringes a patent ends the licence. A violation ends it automatically; stopping within 30 days of notice reinstates it once.

Common cases

Situation	Reading (to be confirmed by counsel)
A family running the node at home	permitted
A home-lab user who is a sysadmin by trade, at home	permitted
A school, library or non-profit	needs a commercial licence; free or discounted on request
A freelancer testing it before recommending it	permitted; deploying it for the client is not
A free, non-commercial fork on GitHub	permitted with the licence and a modification notice, under another name

A full FAQ is planned (PRD-051).

Commercial licence

For businesses self-hosting the node and anyone building a service on opdns: contact [email protected]. Until pricing exists, requests get a 90-day evaluation licence and a quote.

Blocklists

The lists opdns compiles come from third parties under their own licences. Each list’s source and licence is shown in the catalogue (the dashboard’s Privacy page, or GET /v1/lists, which also lists every source of a list with its licence, licence URL and the attribution it requires).