Licensing & Source Transparency
Source transparency you can verify. Community protection built in.
TrustRosie.io is developed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL 1.1), a source-available license that balances transparency, community participation, and sustainable development.
What BSL 1.1 Means for You
Source code is viewable and auditable
Review the implementation, verify security practices, and understand how the platform works. No black boxes.
Community contributions welcome
Study, fork, and improve the codebase. Developers can contribute directly to the platform.
Extraction protection
Competing hosted services require a commercial license. This prevents value capture without contribution.
Auto-converts to Apache 2.0
Every line of code has a guaranteed open-source future, typically converting after four years from each release.
Who Can Use TrustRosie.io Under BSL 1.1
- Organizations for internal use
- Service providers using the platform to serve their clients
- Researchers and educators
- Contributors improving the platform
- Non-profit and open-source projects
The only restriction: you cannot offer TrustRosie.io as a competing hosted service without a commercial license.
Why Not Pure Open Source?
The history of open-source infrastructure shows a recurring pattern: a project builds community under a permissive license, then a well-funded cloud provider launches a competing managed service that captures the commercial value without contributing back. The original creators struggle to fund development, and the project stagnates.
BSL 1.1 is a proactive response. It provides the transparency and community benefits of open source while ensuring that the investment in development is protected long enough to build a self-sustaining ecosystem. Companies like MariaDB, CockroachDB, Sentry, and HashiCorp have adopted BSL 1.1 successfully.
Cooperative Alignment
Members Benefit
Revenue from the platform flows back to contributors and the organizations that operate nodes — not to external corporations.
Democratic Control
The ecosystem's Governing Body — elected members who set governance policies — ensures the platform cannot be co-opted by forking and out-investing the community.
Eventual Openness
The automatic conversion to Apache 2.0 guarantees the code becomes fully open source after the protection period.
Your Intellectual Property
Copyright remains with you
Contributing content to the network does not transfer ownership. Your intellectual property stays yours.
Licensing terms set by the creator
IPR owners define their own rates and terms for how their content can be used and licensed.
Attribution is transparent
When content is used in a response, the system tracks and reports which sources contributed.
Trust Through Transparency
For organizations evaluating TrustRosie.io, source availability means security is verifiable, there is no vendor lock-in, and privacy claims are auditable. You can review access control, data isolation, and encryption practices directly in the code.