XLicense — License for (almost) all stuff being released by the Xinity Group to the open-source public domain
Below is presented a friendly description of the Xinity License. The License itself is located in LICENSE.txt which may be found alongside the source of every our work released to the public domain under Xinity License. The actual Xinity License, not this description should be used for any juridical-related aspects.
We are a group of enthusiasts from Kyiv, Ukraine whom one day united with the idea to work together towards creating innovative products. The closest term describing our activity is doing a startup, though we don't like the "startup" narrative.
At the moment of writing this, Xinity Group includes the following members (in order of joining time):
But you can always check the latest members status in XAUTHORS.txt alongside the Xinity License
We clearly understand the benefits of open-source software and want the results of our work to be accessible and used. But releasing our work with a license like MIT, BSD or GPL is not something we could afford for now. As we plan to release a lot of useful components to the public domain in the future, we are being afraid that our works may be used by some serious market players bloated with resources we don't have at the moment.
That is why we came with the idea of releasing our works based on a Non-compete Agreement. If one big company decides to use parts of our works to build the product similar to what we are building — legally, they will be limited in such a possibility. One the other hand, if a person or company is creating a product which has nothing to do with the products we are developing – they will be able to use our works and probably benefit from it.
This way, our License is a perfect compromise between keeping our works totally closed and keeping them absolutely open.
At the moment of writing this text, we are interested in developing the home and business security systems. And still have not released any product to the market.
So, if you are a hobbyist, an enthusiast, developing something for own or community needs; and your project is not a security system — feel free to use our works. Please make sure that you either use our works as-is, without introducing any changes (i.e. using them as libraries, frameworks, or other already-made software components, talking to the provided APIs) or send us back the resulting works in case you have introduced some changes to them. In the latter case, we prefer getting the changes via Pull Requests.
If your project has a relation to home and business security systems (or any project we have released to the market at the moment of you reading this), the use of our published works may be problematic because it may break the Non-compete Agreement. When in doubt, feel free to write me (thodnev < a t > xinity.dev) to discuss all the possible limitations.
If you represent a company and want to use our works, what we recommend doing is showing our Xinity License to the law consultant of your company first. We are open to any kind of discussion if you have problems using our works.
We understand, that nowadays companies are being afraid of using works which have a license they are not familiar with. It happens that a lot of great software components licensed under GPL and even LGPL are constantly being banned from use in commercial software products. To overcome these limitations, we may provide our works to your company under a lifetime commercial license for a modest amount of money (like 50...400 USD). We do not force companies to buy a commercial license, but instead, provide it as one of the possible options. And one may see this option as much simpler, than dealing with this license.
If you find any problems with the Xinity License, we encourage you to write us. We want to make our License and the corresponding works published under it as simple to use as possible, following the goals described above.