Licensing

Commission is proprietary. The repository is private. All rights reserved.

See LICENSE LICENSE for the terms.

This page records the decision, why it overrides the recommendation in business-model.md docs/business-model.md, and — more usefully — what it changes about how Commission has to be built.

The decision

Commission is a commercial product. It is not open source, not source-available, and the repository is not public. Distribution is by compiled binary under a commercial agreement.

The business-model document recommended Apache-2.0. That recommendation was considered and overridden by the owner, for a reason the analysis underweighted: Commission is not a component, it is the coordination layer a company would run its engineering through. A permissive licence on that is giving away the product, not seeding a channel.

The counter-arguments in business-model.md §6 stand and are not withdrawn. They are consequences to manage, listed below, rather than reasons to revisit.

What this changes about building Commission

Three of them are load-bearing. This is the section that matters.

1. In-product teaching is now the entire teaching surface

The strongest argument for openness was corpus presence: an agent’s ability to operate Commission correctly is a function of how much Commission text exists publicly. A private repository means there will be none. No source in training data, no forks, no Stack Overflow answers, no other people’s CLAUDE.md files.

Every model that ever operates Commission will learn it from exactly three places:

1. commission prime — the operating manual the CLI prints
2. MCP tool descriptions — what a model reads before choosing a tool
3. Refusal messages — what it reads when it gets something wrong

That is the whole channel. It moves those three from “nice polish” to the product’s primary interface, and it means a vague tool description or a lazy refusal is not a cosmetic problem — it is the only lesson the model will ever get. Budget accordingly.

2. Distribution has to be built for proprietary binaries

• Homebrew core will not accept a proprietary formula. A private tap is required, which relay-52 already plans — but it must be a cask or a binary-only formula, never a build-from-source one.
• npm can host it, but only as a package that downloads or embeds a binary. The source tree must never be published. package.json is therefore marked private: true and license: UNLICENSED, which makes accidental publication fail loudly rather than silently succeed. A separate, minimal distribution package is needed for relay-52.
• Container images are fine and unaffected.
• The install script is fine, and becomes the most important path, because it is the only one with no third-party policy in the way.

3. Nothing may point at a public repository

No “View on GitHub” link, no “edit this page” link, no issue tracker URL, no repository field pointing somewhere a reader cannot go. A 404 is worse than an absence: it reads as broken rather than deliberate. The marketing site already handles this correctly and must keep doing so.

What is still free

Nothing about this decision changes the free tier described in business-model.md docs/business-model.md §2. The local single-player loop stays free and unlimited — every command, unlimited tasks, projects, agents, and concurrency, no account. That is a product and adoption decision, not a licensing one, and it survives intact.

“Free to use” and “open source” are different claims. Commission makes the first and not the second.

Open questions for counsel

Not blockers for RC1, but they need answering before Commission is sold:

• Terms of service and an acceptable-use policy for any hosted offering
• Whether the free tier is a licence grant or a revocable permission, and what happens to a customer’s local database if that permission ends
• A contributor agreement, if anyone outside the copyright holder ever commits
• Trademark registration for the Commission name and any wordmark
• Export and data-residency posture, which enterprise procurement will ask about

Revisiting

This decision is reversible in one direction only: proprietary can become open, open cannot become proprietary. Nothing needs to be decided again unless the strategy changes.

The one signal worth watching is agent competence. If models operating Commission turn out to struggle in a way that traceably comes from Commission’s absence from public text, that is the corpus-presence argument arriving as a real product defect rather than a theoretical cost — and it would be worth re-reading business-model.md §6 at that point.