Hi! I have a legal question about the "Prefect Community License" (https://www.prefect.io/legal/prefect-community-license/) We have an app that does computations which we show the result of to our customers, and we are thinking about using Prefect to orchestrate our computations, but it's unclear whether the license allows us to do this?

IANAL but my understanding is you basically can't resell prefect itself (aka, I can't make a new company called Perfect Prefect and just sell what's in a nutshell prefect cloud), showing the results of an ETL is fine.

Hey @Eric — great question and sorry the license isn’t more clear, we’re looking at improving that with an FAQ. @Ben Davison is correct, your usage is absolutely permitted by the license. We love hearing about businesses that use Prefect Server to power their products.

that's my understanding as well. but I'm looking for an official answer to show my manager 😅

Let your manager know we’re always available to chat if they have further specific questions 🙂 and of course our team is here to support you as you build out!

one more question: I'm assuming we wouldn't be allowed to show the prefect UI to our customer if they want to tweak things?

WIthout knowing the specifics, we would consider serving the UI to your customer the same as offering Prefect itself as a service and would instead urge you to offer your own API that passed the replay instruction to your internal Prefect instance. This is a use case we may have already solved for you in Prefect Cloud if you want to explore it.

ah, if we just expose our own interface that allows the customer to replay a job that would be ok?

Yes, Prefect Server is intended for your company’s internal use, and (our hope is!) that would include powering a product you build to offer to your own users

that's perfect (pun intended 😜), thanks!

you got it!

That's interesting though: IANAL as well, but it could mean that while the source code of Prefect Server is publicly available, it is actually not Open Source.

Hi Amanda, I think you may be referring to the fact that our license is not one of the OSI-approved standard licenses, and therefore the OSI would not apply the term “Open Source.” We use the term “open-source” as it is commonly understood by the majority of our users, to mean that our product’s source code is available and may be freely inspected and executed. A member of the OSI would refer to that as “source-available,” a term we do not use because it is not well-known or understood.

Yes, though being OSI-approved is one thing; this licence is arguably not OSD-compliant to begin with. In a way that's a Good Thing because the OSI has not properly addressed predatory practices against software that's meant to be of the "as a service" variety like Prefect Server so I can understand both the licence restrictions and pragmatic use of the term, yet it also feels misleading because "open source" does have the implication of "can be freely used". Perhaps you would consider adding "source-available" or some other parenthesized clarification on the website where "open source" is mentioned?