In plain words first
The legal text says the same thing at greater length. If the two ever disagree, that is a bug in the text and we want to hear about it.
Free, with nothing held back
- Personal projects and learning.
- Open-source projects.
- Evaluation, development, prototypes and CI.
- Production, if the company shipping it earns under $250,000 a year.
Needs a licence
- Production use inside a company above that threshold.
- Shipping it inside a product you sell to your own customers.
- Anything where you would want a named contact and a response time.
Perpetual, with an update window
Two separate things, and conflating them is what makes most component licences unpleasant.
The licence never expires
Every release published inside your update window is yours to run forever, in production, with no further payment and nothing to renew. Software you paid for that stops working is not something we are willing to ship.
Renewal buys newer releases
When the window ends you keep everything you have and stop receiving what comes next. You renew because you want a fix or a new format, not because production is at risk.
The parts worth reading twice
| Counting developers | A developer is someone who writes code against the library. Not your whole team, not testers, not the people who use the application. |
|---|---|
| Deployments | Unlimited, at every tier. Applications, domains, servers, containers, on-premises installations and air-gapped networks are not counted and never will be. |
| Redistribution | Bundling Apertura inside software you sell or install for third parties requires the Redistribution tier. End-customer installations under it are unlimited. |
| Source code | Not distributed. Source escrow is available with the Redistribution tier for buyers whose procurement requires it. |
| Modification | Not permitted, other than the ordinary bundling and minification your build performs. |
| Warranty | Provided as is. Given that we publish the list of what renders incorrectly, claiming a warranty of exact reproduction would be dishonest. |
| Termination | Only for redistributing outside the terms. Ordinary use, including a lapsed update window, terminates nothing. |
Still unclear whether you need one?
Then you almost certainly do not yet. Build the thing, and if it turns into a business the licence is cheaper than the meeting about the licence.
This page is a summary, not the agreement. The licence document delivered with a purchase is what governs, and it is written to say exactly this. See also licensing and keys.