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Commercial licensing

CopyPaste is dual licensed.

  • GPL-3.0 — free for everyone, forever. See LICENSE.
  • Commercial licence — for organisations that cannot accept the GPL's terms. Contact github@apirest.cl.

Same software, same features. The only thing you buy is a different set of obligations.

Do you actually need one?

Almost certainly not. The GPL asks something of you when you distribute the software or a work derived from it. Using it does not trigger anything, no matter how many people use it or for how long.

You do not need a commercial licence to:

  • Install and use CopyPaste at home or at work, on any number of machines.
  • Deploy it across an entire organisation, including internal IT rollouts.
  • Read, audit, or fork the source.
  • Modify it for your own internal use, without publishing those changes.
  • Run modified code as an internal service — the GPL has no network clause.
  • Contribute changes back.

If you are a company wondering whether rolling this out to your staff needs a licence: it does not. Internal use is not distribution.

Packaging it for a distribution or package manager

You do not need a commercial licence, and you never will. Building CopyPaste for any distribution channel — a package manager, a software repository, or your own build pipeline — is exactly the redistribution the GPL is designed to permit. Ship the package, keep the licence notices and make the source available as the GPL requires, and you are done.

Packagers are welcome here. If something about the build makes your life harder, open an issue — that is a bug worth fixing.

You likely do need one to:

  • Ship CopyPaste, or code derived from it, inside a product you distribute to others, without licensing that product under the GPL.
  • Redistribute it under your own brand without the GPL's source disclosure and licence-notice requirements.
  • Bundle it with hardware or preinstall it on machines you sell.
  • Satisfy a policy or contract that forbids copyleft dependencies in what you ship.

If you are unsure which side you fall on, ask. A short description of what you intend to do is usually enough to answer it, and the answer is often "you are fine, carry on".

What a commercial licence gives you

  • The right to use, modify, and redistribute CopyPaste without the GPL's copyleft obligations — no requirement to publish your modifications or to license your own product under the GPL.
  • Written permission you can hand to your legal or procurement team.

Terms, scope, and price are agreed per case rather than published, because a single-seat integration and an OEM redistribution are not the same deal. Contact github@apirest.cl with what you want to do and the scale of it.

Store distribution

The GPL's section 10 forbids imposing further restrictions on recipients, which conflicts with the terms of some application stores — Apple's App Store being the well-known case. That conflict binds licensees, not the copyright holder: a third party cannot publish CopyPaste there, and the project itself can, under separate terms it grants to itself.

Third-party package repositories and the Microsoft Store are unaffected: both defer to the software's own licence.

Why the project is set up this way

The dual model exists so CopyPaste can stay genuinely free for the people who use it, while commercial redistribution that would otherwise contribute nothing back has a way to support it. Whichever side you are on, the GPL edition is not a crippled version — it is the same application, and it stays that way.

For contributors

Dual licensing only works if the project can license every merged line under both sets of terms, which is why contributions require a signed CLA. You keep the copyright on your work, and the commitments in section 6 of that document bind the project in return. See CONTRIBUTING.md.