Licensing

As with the Internet today, the MaidSafe network cannot be owned or controlled by anyone, it’s OURs, all of us. MaidSafe is completely anonymous, secure and repels human intervention of any kind, it cannot be controlled or ‘owned’. MaidSafe are Open Source with all our code available under GPL3. This means that we don’t own it, it is there for everyone to use (and always will be) and can be forked independently from MaidSafe.

However, this does not mean that MaidSafe is anti-profit. Great products don’t exist without great people and investment backed companies.

Our code is protected by a revenue clause that allows non-GPL codebases to be created completely at the behest of the developer, with only a very small 1% (of revenue) fee without any additional charges, such as developer programs or API keys. The revenue generated here enables MaidSafe to maintain and improve the network for the vast majority of free users, while also repaying our brilliant and patient shareholders. The 1% charge is designed to be small enough that it encourages the businesses, entrepreneurs and innovators of the future, with much lower barriers to entry than they experience within today’s server centric architecture. Compare our offering with the Apple app store, which takes 30% of the developers income while charging a yearly up front developer program fee.

MaidSafe will also not judge any developers app, banning those that either compete or don’t meet some quality standard. We take a simpler approach. We let market forces decide, if an app is of poor quality it will not be used. We are confident that this approach will entice developers and companies to work with us. Both the GPL and our Commercial license provides developers with the comfort of patent protection for their products. The fact that we are Open Source will also encourage collaboration through transparency as developers can check the source code for themselves rather than relying on anything we have to say about it.

Please email all completed Commercial licenses to: licensing@maidsafe.net.

Please note that MaidSafe’s royalty fee is purely for the commercial use of MaidSafe's code and does not include technical support. Dedicated support is not part of our current business plan, although we are hoping community support will be available on GitHub and Stack Overflow.