What is the 'Friendly Captcha License'?

[YugoCode]

Hey :)

I saw that most of the other repositories are MIT licensed, this here is under the 'Friendly Captcha License'. What does this exactly mean?

Am I allowed to use the PoW challenge library in an open source project?

[KirbyDE]

I'd like to know this as well.

[gzuidhof]

Thanks for your question! A bit of a long answer, sorry about that.

We provide parts of our stack open source, such as the frontend widget at friendly-challenge and most of our integrations.

We made the decision to keep our friendly-pow repository as “source available” for now, which means we publish it here primarily for transparency purposes. Currently, the repository cannot be used for other projects without our prior permission.

The background is as follows: we are always further developing Friendly Captcha, and want to do so in a dedicated and sustainable way. Offering a reliable service has a lot more hooks and eyes to it than may be obvious at first, and frankly we need the revenue from our SaaS offering to sustain this and its further development. Friendly Captcha has a social mission as well as being a business: we do already offer our service for free to small to medium sized non-profit and private projects.

Our widget is truly open source, but this bit we are keeping source available for now. We can’t offer support or warranty for this codebase, and parts of it we weren’t even using ourselves anymore on our backend. In the future we will likely be open sourcing more parts of our stack again.

If you have a concrete project for which you want to use this repository’s source code, feel free to send us an email (hello (at) friendlycaptcha.com) with a project description. Given the right project we are happy to provide you or your organisation a license (often for free) so you can use this code.

It is perhaps not the answer you were looking for, but I hope you can understand.

[dev-love]

All versions of friendly-pow are source-available only.

There is one option for you if you have a concrete, non-profit project for which you want to use this repository’s source code, feel free to send us an email (hello (at) friendlycaptcha.com) with a project description. Given the right project we are happy to provide you or your organisation a license (often for free) so you can use this code.

[bryankaplan]

You might want to update the README to clarify this policy.

[dev-love]

You are right! I've just updated the README :)