Grakn & the AGPL

Lately we’ve seen an increase in questions about how we license Grakn. So in this short post I wanted to explain in a bit more detail how Grakn’s license actually works.

There are two editions of Grakn: Grakn Core and Grakn Cluster. Grakn Core provides the core functionalities of the database, and Cluster is the commercial version designed to scale with your business.

The community edition of Grakn Core is licensed under Affero GPL v3, published by the Free Software Foundation. This license is virtually the same as the older GPL. However, the main difference is that, whereas GPL deals with distribution of software, AGPL also covers code and applications that is served over a network. This means that, if you run an application over a web server (for example on the cloud), you are still bound by the copyleft.

Our reasoning in selecting AGPL as our license of choice is to ensure that any enhancements to Grakn are released back to the community.

You are, therefore, allowed to access Grakn from a proprietary application without any problem, but you just cannot modify the code, expose it to users other than yourself, and then not share your work with the community.

But to make it easier for you to comply with the AGPL without compromising any of your proprietary rights, we license all of our connectors and drivers as Apache 2.0 so that you can interface with your applications with ease.

In some organisations, however, legal teams do not allow AGPL/GPL licenses. For them — and anyone else who wishes to — we have various commercial licenses available for both Grakn Core and Grakn Cluster. You can learn more about them from our Download Centre.