Prefect-team, do you have extra guidance you can provide (or point me at examples for other open core projects ) of how to understand your "using the Software, or any derivative works thereof, to make available any software-as-a-service [etc etc]" langauge? What I'm trying to understand where "multi-user" crosses over to "excluded" - I would already assume "selling something" as excluded, but what about if I set up in my companies cloud and multiple people in my company use it? That loosely feels like it might be software-as-service, just that there isn't money (though in a company setting I could imagine department chargebacks and the like) - is that use in appropriate? (while I'm mostly talking about the contract, I'm also would like to know what you intended the spirit to be, I.E. even if this is allowable by the letter of the contract, is that something you intended? (you-all have done good work, and I want to honor what you intend too! 🙂)

Hi @Mike Lutz, thanks for asking a great question! What you’re describing is totally ok - it is NOT excluded - because you aren’t making a service available in a form that competes with Prefect Cloud; you’re using it to advance your own company internally. In fact, we very much WANT businesses to be able to adopt Prefect in the manner you’ve described. We did a comprehensive survey of open-core licensing and decided to model our Prefect Community License on the Confluent Community License. Confluent is a company we admire and we think their license strikes the appropriate balance of as much permissiveness as possible with appropriate defenses - the general idea is that as long as your use of Prefect doesn’t provide a third party (outside your organization) with a competitive alternative to Prefect Cloud, you’re good to go. They have a nice FAQ here which I think we will emulate for Prefect. Let us know how we can be helpful!

Awesome, thanks for your reply @Jeremiah and that helps a bunch! (BTW I'm sure I'm thinking too pedanticly but when you said "because you aren’t making a service available in a form that competes with Prefect Cloud" I keep thinking: "Well, if I build it in my company then there might be some one that use the service I setup instead of buying Prefect Cloud (assuming those people weren't advanced enough to set it up themselves) - so technically couldn't that be call competition? ... your text above makes it clear your not intending it that way - but thats why I double-checked.) Thanks again for you answer and for doing awesome work!

Thanks Mike! I appreciate the level of concern you’re showing, but that really is exactly our intent. If the features we elect to ship in our open-source repo meet your needs, then you and your organization should use them. If or when you require the platform features we offer in Prefect Cloud, or you want to discuss various forms of open-source support, we’re ready to talk! But our express intent is for organizations like yours to find great value in our open-source product, and we’ve learned that the lack of a UI hampered that. Thanks for your interest and the kind words!