Disclaimer: The provided material is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to be legal advice. Please consult with your own legal counsel regarding your situation and specific legal questions you may have. In case of a conflict or inconsistency between this F.A.Q. and the General License Agreement, the agreement prevails.
Users of my software include businesses and programmers like me.
By publishing Ad Astra in the form of source code, I aim to be transparent with my users, provide my work for public audit, and share knowledge with the software development community.
Startups can begin using Ad Astra free of charge to develop a commercial product, and if it succeeds, after the product generates a certain amount of revenue, they should purchase a separate license from me at a reasonable price to continue using the product commercially.
To support the creative endeavors of programmers in developing non-commercial software, my licensing terms grant the necessary rights to allow the development of creative projects based on Ad Astra and distribute them in source code form.
The General License Agreement defines two types of licenses:
- Basic Commercial License, which is granted by default, free of charge, but has certain restrictions on commercial use of the work.
- Full Commercial License, which is available for separate purchase and removes the commercial restrictions of the Basic license.
Both licenses allow you to develop commercial or non-commercial software based on Ad Astra. The main difference between them is the total gross revenue you can earn with your product during its lifecycle.
| License | Max No. of Products | Duration | Max Gross Revenue | Acquiring |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | Unlimited | Perpetual | Up to $200,000 USD | Granted Automatically |
| Full | 1 Product per License | Annual | Unlimited | Available for Purchase |
You should renew the license to continue using new versions and upgrades of my work.
If you do not renew the license, you can keep using the version you have at the time of expiration in your software product perpetually.
You can develop a full-featured software or an API extension that interacts with the API of my crates from crates.io, just as you would in any Rust project.
You can then publish it in source code form and/or on crates.io as well, and distribute it under your own terms, for example, under a permissive license such as MIT, provided that your license covers only your work and does not cover my work.
In this scenario, the end user will acquire a separate license for your work from you and a separate license for my work from me.
To ensure transparency with your users and to avoid possible misunderstandings you can specify that your license covers only your work, and that a license for Ad Astra needs to be acquired separately.
However, my work is provided free of charge for personal use. Therefore, your users will be able to acquire a license from me for personal use of my work without additional fees.
In this case, the authors of the commercial software should acquire a license from you to use your work and a license from me to use my work, which is subject to commercial options.
You can compile the source code of my work together with your source code or any other code you have legal access to into a single executable program and distribute this program on your own terms as part of your commercial or non-commercial product.
When distributing in the form of compiled executables, your users do not need to obtain a license from me to use Ad Astra, and you can distribute your product fully on your own terms.
Additionally, you are not required to distribute this product together with the source code. Your product can be a closed-source program.
However, if you distribute a commercial product, this product is subject to the commercial limitations of the Basic Commercial License, and you are recommended to acquire the Full Commercial License in advance to remove these restrictions. You can purchase this license on my Patreon Page.
In most cases, the Basic Commercial License, which is granted automatically and is free of charge, will cover your needs.
However, if you earn donations or receive funds through crowdfunding campaigns for your project, you should be aware that these sources of funding are considered revenue as well.
If the total amount of earnings does not exceed $200,000 USD, the Basic license remains in full effect. But if your earnings exceed this amount, you are required to acquire a Full Commercial License from me, which you can purchase on my Patreon Page.
As long as you don't modify my work's source code and use it solely through the Ad Astra crates' public API (e.g., by linking to crates.io), you own the project you develop.
This includes both the source code you develop and the compiled executables.
If you find a bug or have a feature suggestion, you can open a pull request in my GitHub repository.
Please note that my work is proprietary software, intended for solo development. For this reason, the agreement requires you to grant me an exclusive license to any changes you make to my project's source code.
However, if you want to create an extension for my crate, you can develop a separate crate that uses my crate's public APIs through Cargo. In this case, you do not need to grant me an exclusive license to your work, and you can distribute your project under any permissive license, such as the MIT license.
I have deliberately designed my crate's APIs to be extendable for third-party authors who want to create dedicated Ad Astra extensions.