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0014: The Republic Lex Aequa License

Date: 2026-10-09 · Status: accepted

Context

Tenax had no license. The OpenAPI document said "Proprietary" and the generated Go headers said Apache 2.0. Tenax will be published later. Anyone should be able to use it for their own backups, commercial users included. Only The Republic should be able to sell it, because it may become a product. A permissive license (Apache 2.0, MIT) would let anyone resell Tenax or run it as a managed backup service. A copyleft license (AGPL) would still allow that, as long as the source is shared.

Decision

  • Tenax is licensed under The Republic Lex Aequa License 1.0 (LICENSE), a source-available license in the style of the Elastic License 2.0. SPDX: LicenseRef-Republic-Lex-Aequa-1.0.
  • Allowed: use for any purpose, including commercial and production use for your own organisation and affiliates, and protecting systems that serve your customers. Also allowed: modifying it, sharing copies free of charge, and having contractors run it for you.
  • Not allowed:
  • selling, renting, leasing or licensing Tenax, or work based on it, to third parties;
  • offering it as a hosted, managed or white-label service, such as backup, restore, disaster recovery or database sandboxes;
  • rebranding it or removing its notices.
  • The license text ships in the repository, the container image (/usr/share/doc/tenax/LICENSE), the Helm chart and every release. Image labels and the chart's Artifact Hub annotation name the SPDX id. Generated Go files carry the header from hack/boilerplate.go.txt.
  • The Licensor may also offer Tenax under other terms (for example, a commercial license).

Consequences

  • Tenax is "source-available", not "open source" in the OSI sense. Pages and announcements must say "source-available" or "free to use".
  • Contributions from outside need an agreement that lets The Republic relicense them (a CLA), or the Licensor loses the right to sell or relicense contributed code. Add one before accepting outside pull requests.
  • Third-party dependencies keep their own licenses (Apache 2.0, BSD, MIT and similar). They allow this use, and their notices travel with the source through go.mod.
  • The Licensor is The Republic IT International de Mexico, S. de R.L. de C.V. ("The Republic"); its review of the text is done (2026-10-10).