License & sustainability
avuru obs is licensed under AGPL-3.0. This page explains what that means for you in practice — and it is shorter than you might fear.
The short version
- Use it freely. Self-hosting avuru obs for your team or company — unmodified, in production, at any scale — puts zero obligations on you.
- Your applications stay yours. Observing your services does not make them derivative works. Nothing about your instrumented code is affected.
- Everything shipped stays open, forever. The project's Contributor License Agreement (§2.2) legally pledges that every contribution remains available under AGPL-3.0. The open edition can never be closed or stripped down retroactively.
- Nothing is gated. Authentication, roles, per-project access control and OIDC SSO — capabilities frequently reserved for paid tiers elsewhere — are in the open edition.
- The node agent is Apache-2.0. The sensor on your hosts is upstream OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI), configured — not forked — by avuru obs.
When does the AGPL ask something of you?
In exactly one case: you modify avuru obs itself and make the modified version available to others over a network — for example, running a patched hub as a service for third parties. Then the people using it must be able to obtain the source of your modifications. For an internal deployment, "the people using it" are your own team, so in practice this is a no-op.
Redistributing or operating avuru obs unmodified requires only what is already public: the license and the source. If the AGPL does not fit your case — embedding avuru obs or one of its modules into a proprietary product, say — a commercial license is available: egilberny@lab.luxavuru.com.
Why the AGPL
Observability platforms hold the most sensitive telemetry an organization produces. avuru obs is built as a sovereign alternative to per-host SaaS billing — and sovereignty is only credible if the software can never be enclosed. A permissive license would leave the open edition free for any incumbent to absorb into a closed, proprietary service — including its energy and carbon accounting. The AGPL closes that door: whoever builds on avuru obs builds in the open. How that positions the project against each alternative is laid out in the comparison section.
For the people actually deploying it, the difference is invisible: AGPL self-hosting carries the same zero obligations as permissive self-hosting.
What is licensed how
| Component | License |
|---|---|
| Hub, UI, gateway, Helm charts | AGPL-3.0 |
| Sensor (node agent) | Apache-2.0 — upstream OBI, deployed via Helm, not forked |
| Go/TS dependencies | Apache-2.0 / MIT / BSD — attribution ships as THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md |
Editions and sustainability
- Open edition — this is the product. Everything documented on this site, including authentication, RBAC and OIDC SSO. AGPL-3.0, forever.
- Enterprise edition (planned) — a separate commercial offering for organization-scale needs (multi-tenancy, advanced retention and compliance). It adds to the open edition; it never removes from it.
- Commercial / dual licensing — for vendors embedding avuru obs where the AGPL doesn't fit: egilberny@lab.luxavuru.com.
- Sponsoring — individual sponsorship is being set up to fund CI, eBPF test hardware across kernel versions, and signed multi-arch releases. Links will appear in the project README once live.
Contributing and the CLA
Contributors sign a one-time Individual CLA on their first pull request — a bot handles it, signing is a single comment. You keep ownership of your work; the project gains the rights that make the model above possible; and §2.2 guarantees your contribution stays available under AGPL-3.0 forever. Details: CONTRIBUTING.md.