License and AGPL

Omicron is free software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later). The full text is in LICENSE.

What you may do

• Run it, for any purpose, including commercially.
• Study and modify it.
• Share it, modified or not.

There is no field-of-use restriction, no user cap, and no separate commercial licence to buy.

What you must do

If you distribute Omicron, or a modified version, you must pass on the same freedoms: source code, under the same licence, with copyright notices intact.

Section 13 — the network clause

This is the part that matters for a hosted service, and it is why Omicron is AGPL rather than GPL:

If you run a modified version on a server and let users interact with it over a network, you must offer those users the corresponding source code of your modified version.

In plain terms: you cannot take Omicron, change it, run it as a public service, and keep your changes private. Your users are entitled to the source of the thing they are actually using.

Running it unmodified

If you run stock Omicron with no source changes, section 13 asks nothing extra of you: the corresponding source is upstream, and the app’s “Source” link already points there.

Configuration, instance settings, branding-level content, and your own posts are not modifications of the program.

The Source link

The app surfaces a Source link in the UI for exactly this purpose. If you deploy changes, point it at your fork. That single change is usually all it takes to satisfy section 13 in practice.

Practical guidance for operators

Situation	What you need to do
Stock instance	Nothing beyond keeping the Source link intact
You changed the code and run it publicly	Publish your fork and point the Source link at it
You changed the code and run it privately, alone	Nothing — no network users to offer source to
You redistribute images or a fork	Ship the source under AGPL-3.0-or-later

For contributors

By contributing you agree your work is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later. Every source file carries an SPDX header:

// SPDX-License-Identifier: AGPL-3.0-or-later

Keep it on new files. See Contributing.

Why this licence

The project’s stated aims are freedom of speech, no vendor lock-in, and self-hostability. A licence that let someone build a closed, hosted fork on top of the same code would undercut all three. AGPL keeps the improvements flowing back to the people running instances.

This documentation

The documentation site (the-jk-labs/omicron-docs) is a separate repository from the application, and it carries two licences — code and prose want different things:

What	Licence
The site’s source code — layouts, components, styles, config	AGPL-3.0-or-later, as above
The documentation text — every page you are reading	CC BY-SA 4.0

CC BY-SA 4.0 is copyleft too. You may share and adapt these pages, including commercially, provided you:

• attribute — credit the Omicron documentation, link back, and note that you made changes;
• share alike — license your adapted version under CC BY-SA 4.0 as well.

So translating the docs, quoting a page, or forking them into your own instance’s handbook are all fine. Republishing them as a closed, proprietary manual is not.

Suggested attribution:

Based on the Omicron documentation by The JK Labs, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made.

The full breakdown, including SPDX identifiers, is in COPYING.md.