Open source. Clear boundaries.
The Ablative Stack is open source. Every line of code is publicly available, readable, and modifiable. How you use it determines whether you need a commercial license.
Open-source licenses
Apache License 2.0
Fully permissive. Use, modify, distribute, and embed in any product — open source or proprietary — with no obligations beyond preserving the license notice. No restrictions on commercial use. No copyleft requirements.
AGPL-3.0
OSI-approved open-source license. Use, modify, and deploy freely. One condition: if you modify Aion or Norn and offer the modified version as a network service to external users, you must make the source code of your modifications available under the same license.
Do I need a commercial license?
No — in most cases.
You do NOT need a commercial license if you are:
- +Using the Ablative Stack internally within your organisation, for any purpose
- +Running Liminal, Aion, or Norn on your own servers for your own team
- +Building an application that calls Liminal, Aion, or Norn through their APIs — your application code stays yours
- +Studying, learning from, or contributing to the code
- +Using it for academic research
- +Building open-source projects
You DO need a commercial license if you are:
- —Offering Liminal, Aion, or Norn as a hosted service to external users (e.g. "workflow orchestration as a service")
- —Embedding modified Liminal, Aion, or Norn code into a proprietary product distributed to customers
- —Building a managed platform that provides Liminal, Aion, or Norn functionality to third parties
Not sure? hello@ablative.com.au
The licensing boundary
Using only the Apache-2.0 components (Beamr, Haematite, and Frame) carries no AGPL obligations whatsoever, even if you also have Liminal, Aion, Norn, or Lys installed. The AGPL applies only to the code it covers. If your application communicates with Aion through its API, your application code is not subject to the AGPL — they are independent programs communicating through a defined interface.
Contributing
We welcome and encourage contributions to all parts of the stack. Contributions are accepted under the same license as the component you're contributing to — no separate contributor license agreement required.