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.
Not open source — yet. On purpose.
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 once — it was called Python 2 to 3, and a decade later the wreckage was still being cleaned up.
UnREST's interfaces are still being settled by real deployments. I won't hand out a promise I know I'd have to break. So the distribution ships under license — free for developers and individuals, commercial when you build a business on it — and the source stays unpublished until the interfaces are worth freezing.
The trajectory runs the other way from a vault: The FrogNet Foundation is being established to steward the technology so it ends up owned by the people who use it — not by me, and not by anyone else. The company and the Foundation →
Licensing, answered plainly.
Is it open source?
No — not yet, and by decision rather than default. Publishing source is publishing interfaces, and interfaces are promises the architecture isn't ready to make. The reason and the trajectory are spelled out 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. The review isn’t a gate for its own sake — running shared infrastructure means knowing who runs the fabric.
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.