Licensing & support

AgentSwarms is source-available under the Elastic License 2.0 — not open source, and the difference matters to a legal team. In one sentence: use it, change it, run it for yourself and your clients freely; do not turn it into a hosted service you sell. Everything below restates the LICENSE.md file rather than adding to it — if the two disagree, the licence governs.

The questions you are going to be asked

Yes

Can we run it inside our company for our own staff?

Yes, on any number of machines, for any number of employees, with no fee and no registration. This is the case ELv2 is designed to allow.

Yes

Can we modify the source?

Yes. Fork it, patch it, build your own features on top. You may not remove or obscure the licensing and copyright notices.

Yes

Can we redistribute it, or ship it inside our own product?

Yes, provided it still carries the licence and notices, and provided you are not offering it to third parties as a hosted or managed service.

Yes

Can a consultancy deploy it for a client?

Yes. Installing, configuring and operating it on infrastructure the client owns is ordinary use. What is not permitted is you hosting it and selling access to it as your own service.

No

Can we offer it to our customers as a hosted or managed service?

No. This is the one substantive restriction in ELv2 and the reason the project is source-available rather than open source. A separate commercial licence covers this — it is available, so the answer is really "not under this licence".

No

Can we strip out the licence-key or notice functionality?

No. ELv2 explicitly prohibits circumventing licence-key functionality and removing or obscuring the licensing, copyright or other notices.

No

Can we use the AgentSwarms name or logo for our deployment?

No. The name, logo and hosted service are trademarks of the project author. ELv2 licenses the code, not the brand — rename your deployment.

No

Do we owe anything if we exceed some usage threshold?

No. There is no seat count, no usage metering and no telemetry. The licence does not vary with how much you use it.

No

Are the dependencies a problem for redistribution?

No. Every direct dependency is permissively licensed (MIT / Apache-2.0 / ISC / BSD). The full audit is in ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md in the repository.

Talk to us

We need an indemnity, a warranty, or a signed agreement.

ELv2 is provided as-is with no warranty, like most software licences of its kind. If your procurement requires an indemnity or a negotiated contract, that is a commercial licence conversation rather than a limitation of the software.

Support

Self-hosting means you operate it. These are the options for when you would rather not do that entirely alone.

Community

Included

How most people use the project.

  • GitHub issues and discussions
  • Full documentation in the repository
  • Best-effort response, no target time
  • Public fixes ship in the normal release flow

Commercial

Contact us

For teams that need an agreement rather than goodwill.

  • A licence covering hosted/managed-service use
  • Agreed response targets
  • A named contact and a private channel
  • Deployment and upgrade assistance
  • Security questionnaire and procurement support

Still not sure which side of the line you are on?

The dividing question is almost always: are third parties paying you for access to AgentSwarms itself, or are they paying you for something else that happens to use it? The second is fine. If you are genuinely unsure, ask — a commercial licence exists precisely so the answer does not have to be no.

See also Security for the posture your reviewer will want, and ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md for the dependency licence audit.