Reference

Licensing

Tracon ships under the PolyForm Small Business License 1.0.0. Three packages are MIT instead. Nothing in any package checks, enforces or reports your licence.

Are you free to use it?

Yes, at no cost, if your company has fewer than 100 total individuals working as employees and independent contractors, and less than 1,000,000 USD (2019, adjusted for inflation) total revenue in the prior tax year.

An individual, a student, a hobby project and an open source project are all under that threshold.

Above the threshold, using Tracon needs a commercial licence. Write to hfarukatasoy@gmail.com.

The clause that governs is the Small Business section of the licence text itself. The summary here is a reading aid, not the terms.

Which package is which

Licence	Packages
MIT	`Tracon.Abstractions` · `Tracon.Testing.Contracts.Xunit` · `Tracon.Templates`
PolyForm Small Business 1.0.0	Every other package, and `@tracon/client` on npm

Each package carries its own licence text inside the .nupkg, and states it in the package metadata. If a package’s metadata and the file inside it ever disagree, the file inside the package governs.

Why those three are MIT

The split follows one rule: everything you need in order to extend Tracon, or to own the code it generates for you, is free of the threshold. Everything that actually runs an agent is not.

Tracon.Abstractions carries interfaces and record types, nothing that runs. You implement IRunStore, IModelProvider, IRunJudge, IAgentSource or IJobHandler against it.
Tracon.Testing.Contracts.Xunit carries the behaviour contract suites your implementation has to pass — the same scenarios the shipped implementations run. It depends on Tracon.Abstractions and nothing else, so the whole path from writing an extension to proving it correct stays MIT end to end.
Tracon.Templates generates source into your project. That code is yours, under no obligation to these terms.

A licence scanner resolves transitive dependencies, so an MIT package that depended on a PolyForm one would stop your build anyway and the MIT label would buy you nothing. A test in the repository enforces that this never happens.

There is no licence key

No Tracon package contains an activation call, a licence check, a phone-home request, a trial timer or a feature gate. Nothing degrades, expires or refuses to start. Compliance is yours to determine, the same way it is for every other dependency your build already carries.

This is a deliberate product decision, not an omission, and it will not change for a capability that already shipped.

A published version keeps its licence

The licence of a version that is already on NuGet or npm never changes. If the terms are ever revised, the revision applies to versions published after that point; what you already restored stays under the terms it shipped with.

Questions a procurement review usually asks

Is this an OSI approved open source licence? No, and deliberately so. PolyForm Small Business is a source-available licence with a size threshold. Its SPDX identifier is PolyForm-Small-Business-1.0.0.

May we modify it? Yes. The licence grants a copyright licence to make changes and new works, and to distribute copies, within a permitted purpose.

Is there a patent grant? Yes, with a defensive termination clause: asserting a patent claim against the software ends your patent licence.

What happens if we cross the threshold mid-term? Use for the benefit of your company stops being a permitted purpose, and you need a commercial licence from that point. Get in touch and it will be handled without drama.

What if we are already in breach? The licence gives you 32 days from written notice to come into compliance, after which the licences end.

The full terms

The canonical text is reproduced without modification in LICENSE.md, which ships inside every PolyForm-licensed package, and in LICENSE-MIT.md for the three MIT ones. Both are also at the root of the repository.