The short version
CaveCMS is released under the Prosperity Public License 3.0.0 (prosperitylicense.com). It belongs to a family people call fair source: the source is open and auditable, free for personal and non-profit use, with a paid licence for commercial use that keeps the project alive.
In a sentence: free for people, paid for business.
Free for personal use, forever
If you are running CaveCMS for a personal site, a family blog, a school project, a portfolio, a side project, a charity, a non-profit, a government department, or academic research, it is free for you, with no expiration, no licence key, and no phone-home. Read the source, modify it, deploy it, keep going.
Free for thirty days for commercial use
You can run CaveCMS for any commercial purpose (a business website, a paying-customer site, a SaaS, a client project, e-commerce) free of charge for thirty days. That window is meant to be enough to know whether the tool fits. No card, no countdown banner in the admin. After thirty days you pick up a commercial licence and carry on.
A single licence covers all your commercial sites
One Commercial licence covers every commercial site you build or operate. There is no per-seat fee, no per-site fee, no traffic cap. Whether you run one product site or two dozen client websites, one licence is enough.
Commercial pricing will be published at v1.0 launch. Sponsors who buy a licence before launch are grandfathered into the original price for the lifetime of their licence.
What you can and cannot do
Under the Prosperity licence, you can:
- • Read every line of source on GitHub
- • Modify the code for your own use
- • Run it for non-commercial purposes, free, forever
- • Evaluate it commercially for thirty days
- • Fork it and distribute your changes (under the same licence)
- • Buy a Commercial licence and run it for any business purpose
The thing the licence asks of you:
- • Don't use it commercially past thirty days without a Commercial licence
- • Don't resell CaveCMS itself as a hosted service
- • Keep the licence notice with the code when you redistribute
Brand and trademarks
The name “CaveCMS”, the painted-brush mark, and the visual identity belong to Derrick Siawor. You can refer to the project by name when you write about it or build on it. Please do not put the mark on a competing or repackaged product.
Source code, plain text, the full thing
The full licence text, every word, is in the LICENSE.md file shipped with the source. Read it on GitHub. The plain-English summary that walks you through every clause lives at prosperitylicense.com.
Repository: github.com/derricksiawor/cavecms.
Future versions
Whatever version of CaveCMS you have is yours under the licence terms that came with it, forever. If a future version of CaveCMS adopts a different licence, you can keep using the version you have indefinitely under the original terms.
Questions
The honest summary lives on the pricing page, and how every release is signed and verified is on the trust page. If you have a specific situation you're unsure about (an unusual non-profit, an internal tool, a research project), email [email protected] and we will give you a straight answer.