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License
The current Aurora license, why it is open, and how we think about long-term project sustainability.
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Current license
Apache License 2.0
Read the current license in full on GitHub.
Open link →
Aurora OSS is released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. You can use it, modify it, redistribute it, and ship it as part of a commercial product, as long as you preserve the copyright notice and the license terms. The full text is short and worth reading.
Why open source
An AI gateway is infrastructure. It sits between every request your application makes and every model it talks to. That kind of component should be something you can read, audit, extend, and trust. You should not have to take it on faith.
Open source gives you:
- Source visibility — the routing, translation, and policy code is on GitHub, line by line.
- Vendor optionality — if the project is abandoned, you fork it.
- Operational honesty — a closed-source gateway can claim any behavior; an open-source gateway has to match its code.
- Community leverage — bug reports, provider integrations, guardrail recipes, and dashboard work come from people who use the gateway every day.
What could change
We want to be upfront: there are two cases where the license could change down the road. They target specific situations, not individual developers or small teams.
Protecting the project from extraction by large cloud providers
A well-documented pattern in infrastructure: a large cloud provider takes an open-source project, ships it as a managed service, gives nothing back, and uses its scale to outcompete the project that built the thing in the first place. Several projects have had to react:
- MongoDB changed to the SSPL after AWS launched DocumentDB.
- Elastic moved to a dual license after AWS launched its own Elasticsearch service under the OpenSearch name.
- Redis switched to a source-available license for the same reason.
If Aurora grows to a point where this becomes a real risk, we may adjust the license to prevent that kind of extraction. Any such change would target companies that profit directly from the project, not the individual developers and small teams who build on it.
Sustainability for the people who build it
Building Aurora is how the team makes a living. Right now the project is fully open source, and we intend to keep it that way for as long as possible. If licensing changes ever happen, they will exist to keep the project healthy — not to lock anyone out of building with Aurora.
What this means in practice
Enterprise is a separate distribution
Aurora Enterprise is a separately licensed distribution. It is not on GitHub. It adds identity, RBAC, tenants, budgets, cluster mode, compliance, and observability exports. Enterprise customers license those features; OSS users get the rest under Apache 2.0 unchanged.
The split is intentional: the core gateway stays open, the add-ons that need commercial development stay commercial.
Sustainability model
The project's funding model is:
- OSS is free forever under Apache 2.0 (subject to the conditions above).
- Enterprise is a paid product that funds the OSS team's continued work.
- Support contracts are available for teams that need them.
- Custom development and integration work is available on request.
If the funding model changes, you will read about it on this page and in the Changelog before any code change ships.
Related
- Who We Are — the team and community
- Our Values — the values that drive licensing decisions
- Enterprise Overview — what Enterprise adds on top of OSS
- Changelog — every release