Licensing
Free to build with. Licensed to build a business on.
Two tiers, stated plainly. Developers and individuals use FrogNet for free. Using it as the platform under a commercial product needs a commercial license from Fawcett Innovations.
One line: are you making money on it?
If FrogNet is helping you make money as a platform, that's commercial. Everything short of that — learning, tinkering, research, running it for yourself — is free.
Developer & Individual
Free
- Personal, hobby, educational, and research use.
- Non-commercial deployment — your home, your lab, your neighborhood.
- Evaluation and prototyping ahead of a commercial decision.
- Full access to the distribution under the developer terms.
Commercial
Contact for terms
- Using FrogNet as a core platform to make money — the networking layer under a product or service you sell.
- Deploying it operationally inside a for-profit organization.
- Bundling or redistributing it in a commercial offering.
- Terms are per-arrangement.
Access is to the distribution under those terms; the source is not published. The full license text ships with the distribution.
A published spec, not a published codebase.
Publishing source means publishing interfaces, and a published interface is a promise: the moment people build on it, you carry it forever or you break them. The world already ran that experiment — it was called Python 2 to 3, and a decade later the wreckage was still being cleaned up. The lesson isn't “stay closed.” It's that the thing you freeze has to be a contract — versioned and negotiated — not an accident of whatever the code happened to do.
The first visible instalment of that endpoint is already public: the book's repository, Discussions open, fourteen categories, no account with us required.
So the endpoint isn't a dumped repo — it's an open specification. The wire protocol, the semantic codec, the freshness classes, and the election rules get written up the way a real standard is: normatively, implementation-independent, and versioned so an old node and a new node always negotiate rather than schism. The build manual, Magnum Croakus, is the foundation that spec is extracted from. Anyone can implement against the contract; FrogNet's engine is the reference implementation, not the definition.
That's why the source staying closed for now costs you nothing that matters: you don't need our code to build on the protocol, only the spec — and the interfaces freeze once real deployments have settled them, not before, so the contract is worth keeping when it's made.
The FrogNet Foundation is being established to steward that standard so it ends up owned by the people who use it — not by me, and not by anyone else. Three layers, on purpose: the standards body stewards the protocol, the Foundation stewards the project, and Fawcett Innovations builds the commercial reference implementation. The company and the Foundation →
Licensing, answered plainly.
Is it open source?
The engine isn't — it's a licensed reference implementation. But the protocol is headed for an open, versioned specification you can implement against without our code, which is the part that actually matters for building on it. The reasoning is in The plan above.
Can I use it at work to evaluate it?
Yes — evaluation and prototyping are covered by the free tier. The commercial line is crossed when it becomes the platform under something you sell or operate for profit.
Can I deploy it across my house, lab, or neighborhood?
Yes. Non-commercial deployment for yourself or your community is free.
What exactly counts as commercial?
Using FrogNet as a core platform to make money: as the networking layer under a product or service you sell, redistributed in a commercial offering, or run operationally inside a for-profit organization.
How do I get the developer license?
Request access on the developer-license page. It's a short form; access follows once it's reviewed.
How do I get a commercial license?
Email john@fawcettinnovations.com with what you're building and how FrogNet fits. Terms are set per arrangement.
Start building
Get the developer license.
Free, and the answer is usually yes. A short form, a quick review, then access and the build manual.