License
The code we deliver is source-available under the PolyForm Internal Use License 1.0.0. You get the source, you own the deployment, and there is one thing you may not do with it.
Scope and date
This page explains the license that every delivered repository carries, in plain terms. The license file in the repository is the authoritative text; this is a summary written so that nobody has to read a license to answer a procurement question.
These are the terms for this website and for the code license. The terms of an engagement — scope, fees, service levels and liability — are in your customer agreement. Terms of use covers the website itself.
What the license is
The PolyForm Internal Use License 1.0.0 is a source-available license: you receive the full source code and may use it for the internal business operations of your own company, without the right to distribute it or to sell it on. Nexstella is the licensor, and the repositories handed over at delivery name your organization as the licensee.
In practice this is close to what people imagine open source gives them, minus one thing: you cannot become a competitor with our code. You can read all of it, run all of it, change all of it and keep it forever. You cannot resell it or run it as a service for other companies.
Not a black box you rent
The license is what makes ownership real. There is no runtime we control, no key that expires and no component that phones home. If BuiltForProd disappeared tomorrow, your platform would keep running and your team would still have every line of code that built it.
What you may and may not do
You may
Use the code to deploy, manage and scale your own cloud infrastructure, in as many accounts, regions and stages as you need.
Change variables, resources and logic to fit your requirements. There is no support clause that voids if you edit the code; editing it is the point.
Keep your own fork in your own organization, add modules, and take upstream improvements when you want them rather than when we push them.
Give access to your employees and to contractors working directly for you, including organizations under common control with yours.
Serve your own customers from the platform the code deploys. It is your internal infrastructure, whatever you run on top of it.
You may not
You may not sell the code, or a derivative of it, as a product or a service, and you may not grant anyone else a license to it.
You may not host the code in a public repository or otherwise distribute it outside your organization.
You may not use the code to provide managed services to third-party clients. That is the one line the license is really drawn around.
Copyright notices and the license file stay in the source, including in your fork and in files you have modified.
Common cases
The questions procurement and legal actually ask.
| Can we… | Answer |
|---|---|
| Fork the repositories into our own GitHub organization and customize them. | Permitted |
| Give contractors working for us access to the repositories. | Permitted |
| Run our own product, for our own paying customers, on the platform this code deploys. | Permitted |
| Deploy it into a subsidiary under common control with us. | Permitted |
| Publish our fork so the community can learn from it. | Not permitted |
| Sell a deployment of it to one of our own clients. | Not permitted |
| Operate it on behalf of other companies as a managed service. | Not permitted |
| Remove the license file from the files we changed heavily. | Not permitted |
The dividing line is who benefits. Running your own business on the platform is internal use. Running someone else's business on it, or selling them the code, is not.
The clauses, in plain words
You receive the license by accepting its terms as strict obligations and conditions. Using the code is accepting it.
For a permitted purpose you may do everything with the software that copyright would otherwise prevent, except distribute it.
You may make changes and build new work based on the software, under the same terms. Your changes are yours; the permission to make them comes from here.
The licensor grants a patent license covering the claims you would otherwise infringe by using the software. It ends if you make a patent claim against the software.
Internal business operations of you and your company, where "your company" includes organizations under common control with yours.
The license cannot be sublicensed or transferred, and it does not stop the licensor from licensing the software to anyone else.
On a first written notice, your license continues if you come into full compliance and correct past violations within 32 days. Otherwise it ends immediately.
As far as the law allows, the software is provided as it is and the licensor is not liable for damages arising from the terms or from using it.
The 32-day cure period
A violation does not end your license on the spot. If we give written notice of a violation, your license continues as long as you come into full compliance and correct past violations within 32 days of that notice. Only after that does it end, and only for the party that did not fix it. An honest mistake has a month to become a non-event.
Source-available, not open source
We are precise about this because the words matter to the people who read licenses for a living. BuiltForProd code is source-available: the source is delivered in full, and the license restricts redistribution and commercial resale. It is not an open-source license and we never call it one.
What is open source is the tooling the platform is built on, including OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Kubernetes and ArgoCD, each under its own license and none of them ours to relicense. Nothing about the way we build locks you to a proprietary runtime; the constraint is commercial, not technical.
Where the authoritative text lives
- Every delivered repository carries the full license file and a copyright notice. That file is authoritative if it ever disagrees with this page.
- The unmodified license text is published by the PolyForm Project at polyformproject.org.
- The documentation summarizes the same terms alongside the purchase options, under the knowledge base.
- Questions from legal or procurement go to [email protected], and we will answer them in writing.