---
title: Open for good
canonical: https://stead.ing/open-for-good/
summary: Why Steading can't be relicensed, and what that means for anyone
  building on it.
site: steading
---

# Open for good

Steading is open source, permanently. If there is ever a hosted offering, it exists to support the project, not to capture the market.

That's a promise, and promises about licenses have been broken before. So Steading is set up to make breaking it impossible:

- **Contributors keep their copyright.** Contributions come with a sign-off (the [Developer Certificate of Origin](https://developercertificate.org/)), not a contributor license agreement. With many copyright holders, nobody, including the people who started Steading, can relicense the code later.
- **A permissive license: ISC.** Anyone may host Steading, including better than we do.
- **The name can't be held hostage.** In time the names and marks move to a neutral home.
- **Money serves the project.** Education, support, and hosting for people who'd rather not run it themselves can fund the work. None of them will ever gate it.

## Why not the GPL?

Steading spreads by one engineer adopting one project without asking anyone, and many companies forbid GPL and AGPL code outright. Many Steading projects are also meant to be built into other people's tools, which copyleft would push onto them.

Copyleft protects code from being taken private. Steading protects itself differently: contributors keep their copyright, so nobody can ever relicense it. What makes Steading worth joining is the people building it together, and that can't be forked. Build on it however you like.

See [how we work](how-we-work.md) for how decisions get made.