Today, with the release of Umbrel v0.4, we’re taking a leap in making digital self-sovereignty accessible to the masses. We’re also excited to ann

Everything you need to know about Umbrel’s new license

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2021-08-05 18:30:06

Today, with the release of Umbrel v0.4, we’re taking a leap in making digital self-sovereignty accessible to the masses. We’re also excited to announce that over the coming days, Umbrel’s source code will be relicensed to a new license — PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0, which is much more permissive and suitable than our current license.

TL;DR — if you don’t intend to sell Umbrel, our new license grants you the same freedoms that come with an open source license.

Law follows technology, and naturally, the evolution of licensing has followed the evolution of open source software. To fully grasp the triggers, motivations, and implications of our new license, it helps to first understand how we got here.

The “free software” movement began in the 1980s when UNIX, the most popular OS at the time, ended up being privatized by AT&T.

The developer community wasn’t particularly happy about it, and a few of the developers got together to start the GNU project with the goal to create an OS that granted users the freedom to view, use, distribute and modify the source code however they liked.