Licensing

Running Gnarl needs nothing from us

No account, no key, no activation step, and no node limit. Download it, run it, run as many copies as you want, for as long as you want. Nothing expires and nothing phones home.

That is not a trial. It is the product, and the limits it does not have are promises in the license rather than current policy: the grant covers "any number of instances, nodes, peers, devices, or users, without registration, license key, or quantity limit."

A subscription does have a key

One thing changed when Gnarl started selling something: a private mesh across the internet — your devices reaching each other from different networks — is a paid capability, and the node checks for it.

Here is exactly how that works, because a page that said "nothing checks" would be easier to write and would not be true:

• You get a key when you subscribe. Copy it from the console, paste it once with gnarl activate, and that is the whole activation step.
• The node verifies it offline. The key is a signed statement, checked against a public key compiled into the binary. Your node never contacts us to start, to run, or to keep running — it works on a plane and in a room with no internet.
• If it lapses, nothing is taken. The node drops to the free tier and keeps running. Your data stays readable, your indexes stay intact, and a mesh on one network keeps working. A lapsed card is never data loss.
• Only listed capabilities can be withheld. The license binds us to a published list, and to four limits on it — see Commercial Features.

Everything on the free list above is untouched by any of this.

Then what is "the license"?

Two different things share that word, and it is worth separating them.

The license terms. Gnarl is source-available under the Lucenia Competitive Extraction License (LCEL). That is a legal document describing what you may do with the software. It costs nothing and applies to everyone automatically. You can read it in full.

A commercial agreement. A contract with Lucenia permitting something the terms otherwise prohibit — mainly reselling Gnarl or offering it as a service. Most people never need one.

When someone says "buying a license," they usually mean the second. See when you need one below.

What you may do

• Read the source. Study it, learn from it, quote it in a paper.
• Run it. Any number of instances, nodes, devices, or users. No registration, no key, no quantity limit. This is written into the grant itself, not just promised on a web page.
• Modify it for your own use, including inside a company.
• Build on it — applications, agents, plugins, connectors, SDKs — using the published APIs. Commercial products built this way are fine.
• Redistribute our official binaries, unmodified, with the license and notices intact. Package managers, container registries, distribution repositories, and your own internal mirror are all covered.
• Use AI coding assistants while working with Gnarl or building things that work with it.
• Research, teach, and do security work. Explicitly permitted, including publishing benchmarks.

What you may not do

• Offer Gnarl as a competing service. Hosting it for third parties as a search, retrieval, vector-database, or AI-infrastructure product.
• Build a competitor out of it — including by having an AI system read the repository, its design documents, or its rationale and produce an implementation from that. See the unusual clause.
• Publish modified versions or forks.
• Use Lucenia's name, logo, or product names in a way that implies we endorse you.

Running Gnarl inside your own organisation, at any scale, is not on this list. It is free and needs no agreement.

The unusual clause

Article 5 of the license restricts using Gnarl, or any representation derived from it, as raw material for building a competing product. "Derived representation" includes embeddings, vector indexes, retrieval corpora, architectural summaries, and generated code.

This is not a restriction on learning, and it is not an anti-AI clause. The license explicitly permits reading, studying, teaching, research, debugging, interoperability, and using AI-assisted development tools on Gnarl itself.

The line it draws is between learning from and extracting. A repository and its design documents can now be indexed and handed to an agent with the instruction "build me this," and that produces a competitor without ever copying a line of code. Copyright does not reach that, because copyright covers expression rather than ideas. So the license handles it as a promise you make in exchange for access, rather than as a copyright claim.

If your work is ordinary software development, this clause does not touch it.

When you need a commercial agreement

You need one if you want to:

• offer Gnarl, or something substantially derived from it, as a hosted or managed service to third parties;
• bundle Gnarl into a product you sell, or resell it under an OEM arrangement;
• redistribute a modified build;
• do anything else Article 4 prohibits.

You do not need one to:

• run any number of nodes for your own organisation;
• build and sell a product that uses Gnarl through its APIs;
• mirror our official binaries internally;
• evaluate, research, teach, or contribute.

To start that conversation: gnarl@lucenia.io.

What Lucenia sells

Most of this is something we operate or something we permit. One item is a capability in the software, and it is named rather than buried:

	What it is	Price
Gnarl Personal	A private mesh across the internet, so your devices reach each other from different networks. This one is gated in the node, by a key you paste once. On a single network a mesh is free and always will be.	$9.99/mo
Backup	Encrypted snapshots in a bucket we run, and a restore we test nightly. Pointing Gnarl at a bucket you own is free.	+$4.99/mo
Commercial agreement	Permission to resell, embed, or offer Gnarl as a service.	Contact us
Enterprise support	SSO, audit, compliance reporting, and a support contract.	Contact us

See Pricing for what each one includes, and Commercial Features for the complete, binding list of what may ever be withheld — and the four things that never can be.

Why the node is not open source

The client SDKs are — go-client and python-client are Apache-2.0, and we want them everywhere.

The node is source-available instead, and LCEL is not an OSI-approved open source license. We would rather say that plainly than describe it as open source and let you discover the restrictions later.

The reasoning is narrow: a permissive license would let a cloud provider run Gnarl as a service against us, and it would not address the extraction problem above at all. Everything else — reading it, running it, building on it, modifying it for yourself — we allow, because none of that is the thing we need to prevent.

Contributing

Bug fixes, documentation, performance and security improvements, connectors, integrations, extensions, and plugins are welcome and are not restricted by any of the above. Contributions may be included in future releases, commercial ones included.