Hey everyone, we have a chungus update:

TL;DR: We are releasing a Pangolin Enterprise Edition (EE) alongside the existing Community Edition (CE). The license enables individuals and small businesses to use it 100% for free. The CE is still 100% AGPL compliant.

Since our first attempt to monetize Pangolin, we have been trying to find a viable path forward. When we first tried, we adjusted our plans based on the community’s feedback. This change earned us a lot of goodwill from the community, and we don't want to squander that.

As part of that change, we promised that the community and EE version would be feature-complete.

Since then, we have been working on the cloud version. But while this allows us to charge for “hosting it for you,” we cannot, in good conscience, bring substantial new features to the cloud without also bringing them to the self hosted editions and aligning with our promise.

Pangolin recently raised a seed round of funding. This gives us the runway to work on Pangolin full-time and hire a team to accelerate development and support. We are thrilled to be working on this, but it also means we need to maintain a way to monetize a set of features allowing us to both run a sustainable business and serve the community.

We have come up with a solution that we believe is in the spirit of our original promise. We released an Enterprise Edition alongside the Community Edition, and:

The new Enterprise Edition (EE):

• New container tag: fosrl/pangolin:ee-latest (prepended with ee)
• Fossorial Commercial License (FCL)
• Includes a set of features that the Community Edition does not
• Remains 100% free for personal, non-commercial use and small businesses
• Required opt-in to use this edition

The Community Edition (CE):

• Remains existing container image: fosrl/pangolin
• Does NOT include any proprietary FCL code
• Will be competitively feature-matched to the EE
• Remains 100% AGPL-3 compliant and open-source
• Still the default

Who can use the EE?

The EE is free to use if you are not using Pangolin in a business capacity or if your business makes less than $100,000 in annual revenue. Users who wish to use the EE can opt-in and obtain a free license key from our cloud. Businesses not qualifying will need to purchase a license key from us to be legally compliant, or continue to use the CE. We worked hard on developing a license to make this possible.

Checkout the license: https://digpangolin.com/fcl.html

So, what features are available in the EE right now? None yet! A suite of features will be added soon. EE exclusive features are mostly around teams, compliance, and running Pangolin at scale for our business customers.

Some people are die-hard open-source advocates and believe any monetization is against the ethos. If you are one of those people, we hear you, but we disagree. Good software development takes a lot of time and money. We believe this can be done ethically, and that's what we are trying to do here.

Not everyone will agree with this change. We tried hard to find a solution that works for everyone. Don’t use Pangolin if you disagree with this decision.

Thanks, everyone!

P.S.

There has been some discussion here about the license change. To be clear, we did not relicense any existing features or AGPL code. The community version of Pangolin is – and will remain – 100% AGPL-3 compliant. Existing Cloud (SaaS) code has been brought from a downstream fork into the primary repo in order to improve development speed and to build in the open, and we will soon do the same with EE code.