Notice: Pankha Fan Control is moving to the Business Source License (BUSL-1.1)

[Anexgohan]

Pankha Fan Control is moving to the Business Source License

Hello everyone,

Notice

This is a notice in advance to everyone that Pankha Fan Control will be moving to the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1) instead of AGPL-3.0.

Transition will happen in the next major release "v0.7.0" on "2026/08/01". So this is your chance to fork the project now if you want to keep it under AGPL-3.0.

The new license will be the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1), an open and non-compete license that would convert to the same "AGPL-3.0-only" as our current license after 4 years.

---

Honest explanation

With the recent trademark filing and other legalese, it has been recommended to me that a change of license is required for the vision that I have for Pankha Fan Control, to support its development.

To be honest, I have been a single dev on this project for the last three years, diverting my own money and free time towards it, and honestly I did not properly pay attention to licensing before choosing AGPL, which I was most familiar with at that time.

My vision is to keep this free and open for everyone ("Open" as in "anyone can view it, audit it, fork it, use it"), with support coming from enterprise and business licenses, with some individual licenses for those who have a larger need. This is where the current AGPL does not suffice in the enterprise space.
Thus I have come to a conclusion, with some friendly legal guidance, to move over to a more robust license that offers better protection for the project and its contributors, while keeping it free for everyone else.
Also, doing it now at early stages is better than riding the AGPL to success and rug pulling you later - this is not what I want from this project, so I'm hoping my honesty and transparency will give you confidence in my intentions and vision for this project.

The short version:

This is just a license change. Nothing actually changes for you as a user, unless you are selling Pankha Fan Control as your own product. Every fan control feature stays free. Self-hosting stays free, including commercial self-hosting at work, at any scale. The full source code stays public and auditable. And every release automatically becomes open source under AGPL-3.0 four years after it ships - that promise is written into the license itself and cannot be revoked.

Nothing changes for you. Everything remains as it was. No fan-control feature is blocked or restricted from the free tier - that is not the business model I envision. So you can continue using Pankha Fan Control as if nothing changed. Same goes for subscription and lifetime license holders.

What is changing

Starting with the next release, Pankha Fan Control is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1) instead of AGPL-3.0.

BUSL is a source-available license used by projects like MariaDB, Sentry (2019-2023), CockroachDB, and HashiCorp. It grants everyone the right to use, modify, and redistribute the software, with exactly two things excluded:

1. Selling Pankha as your own competing product or hosted service
2. Removing or bypassing the license key check that enforces paid tier limits

Everything else - personal use, homelab use, business use, modification, redistribution, forking - is permitted, in production, for free.

Four years after each release ships, that release automatically converts to AGPL-3.0, the same open source license Pankha uses today. This is a rolling, irrevocable grant baked into the license text.

What this means for you

You are	What changes
A homelabber or self-hoster	Nothing
A business self-hosting Pankha internally, any scale	Nothing - explicitly permitted
A contributor (code, docs, BMC/IPMI profiles)	Nothing - same CLA as before
A security researcher or license auditor	Nothing - full source stays public
Forking for your own use or to send PRs	Nothing - forking stays permitted
Selling Pankha as your product or hosted service	Not permitted without a partnership
Removing or bypassing the license check	Not permitted

If you are in the first five rows - and practically everyone reading this is - the license change does not affect you.

Why

Pankha Fan Control has been in development for over two years, one of them public. It is self-funded and developed independently: no investors, no sponsor, no company behind it. Development is paid for by exactly one thing - paid tiers for people managing more than a few machines.

Here is the uncomfortable math of that model under AGPL. Every fan-control feature in Pankha is free, on every tier. The only things paid tiers unlock are capacity and API access - more connected agents, longer history, and the REST API. That entire model hangs on one small check in the code. Under AGPL, anyone can legally delete that check, rebuild, and ship an "unlocked" Pankha - or take the whole project and sell it as their own hosted service against us. AGPL not only allows this; it was designed to.

I would rather keep fan control fully free for everyone and protect the one mechanism that funds the work, than start locking features behind paywalls. BUSL is the license that makes that possible: free for users, closed to freeriders, and open source again on a four-year timer.

This model is usually called "fair source" or "source available". Sentry ran on BUSL for years with this exact reasoning, and it is why you can still read, build, and self-host their code today.

How it works, in plain language

• You can read, build, modify, fork, and run Pankha in production for free, including at work.
• The license text lives in LICENSE [currently as draft, will replace the current LICENSE file]. The two exclusions above are the entire restriction; the wording is adapted from HashiCorp's and Elastic's lawyer-drafted grants rather than invented here.
• Each release carries its own conversion date:

release:    v(N)        v(N+1)      v(N+2)     ...
license:    BUSL-1.1    BUSL-1.1    BUSL-1.1
                |           |           |
                +-- 4 yrs --+-> AGPL-3.0 (open source, automatic, irrevocable)

• Paid tiers work exactly as before: same prices, same limits, defined in COMMERCIAL-TERMS.md [currently as draft, will replace the current LICENSE-COMMERCIAL.md file]. If your paid license ever lapses, your deployment reverts to the free tier and your extra agents stay visible in read-only mode - you never lose sight of your machines.

When

• Today: this announcement.
• The change lands with the next release, as stated in the Notice above. Releases published before the switch keep the license they shipped with.

Questions you might have

Is Pankha still open source?
Honestly: no, not by the strict definition of OSI, because the license restricts competing commercial use. It is source available - all code public, auditable, buildable, self-hostable - and every release becomes genuinely open source (AGPL-3.0) four years after it ships.

Can I still self-host at my company?
Yes, explicitly, at any scale, in production. Internal use is never a "competing offering" - the license says so in as many words.

Can I still contribute? Do I need to re-sign anything?
Yes, and contributions work exactly as before: one-time CLA signature via the bot on your first PR. If you signed before, the bot may ask once more for the updated text - the grant you make is materially the same.

Why does the CLA exist?
Because Pankha Fan Control lives under more than one license at once - the public license you are reading about, and the commercial terms that fund development - every contribution has to be usable under both. The CLA is the one-time agreement that makes that possible: you keep the copyright to your work, and you grant the project a license to include it in all versions of Pankha, current and future. Without it, a single merged PR could legally block commercial licensing, or our ability to market it to enterprise customers. You will find the same arrangement in most projects that pair public code with a business, and it is exactly what made this switch clean: every past contribution was already covered.

Can I still fork Pankha?
Yes. Fork for contributions, experiments, personal modifications - all permitted. The only things not allowed are the two exclusions above: selling it as a competing product, or removing/bypassing the license check.

What about versions released before the switch?
They keep the license they shipped with. The new license applies from the switch release onward.

What happens if the project dies?
The four-year conversion is irrevocable and self-executing. Even in the worst case, every release becomes AGPL-3.0 on schedule - the code can never be locked away, by me or anyone else.

Why not just stay on AGPL?
Because AGPL protects the wrong thing for this project. It forces source disclosure - but our source is already public and every feature is already free. What it does not do is stop someone from de-gating the agent limit or selling hosted Pankha against the project that builds it. See the "Why" section above.

Why BUSL?
I looked at a lot of licenses. BUSL won on two points: it lets me set a four-year conversion window, and it lets the code convert to AGPL-3.0 - copyleft forever - instead of a permissive license. This also forces other projects that fork Pankha to release their changes under AGPL-3.0, which is exactly what I want for the ecosystem. No closed sourcing for anyone.

Questions, concerns, disagreement - reply below. I will answer everything.

Signed:

• Anexgohan
  Creator of Pankha Fan Control

[Anexgohan]

change was completed with a grace of +15 days over the decided date.
v0.6.5 was published after that.