Teleport Community Edition will restrict commercial usage starting with version 16

We open sourced Teleport in 2015 with a mission to secure access to infrastructure. It has since become a popular open source project with over 15,000 GitHub stars and is licensed under AGPLv3.

We have been offering the stable releases of the Teleport Community Edition binaries and images distributed under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.

Starting with the June release of Teleport 16, we are switching Teleport Community Edition to a commercial license with new restrictions:

• Individuals are free to use Teleport Community Edition for personal and hobby use with no restrictions.
• Companies may use Teleport Community Edition on the condition they have less than 100 employees and less than $10MM in annual revenue (AR).
• Companies cannot resell or embed Teleport Community Edition in their products or services.
• Companies larger than 100 employees or more than $10MM AR need to contact our sales team to evaluate and use Teleport.
• We will stop distributing compiled binaries, container images, and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) under Apache 2.0 starting with Teleport 16. We will switch the license of those assets to the commercial license of Teleport Community Edition.
• We will continue to support previous versions according to our published schedule. Additionally, we will maintain the Apache 2.0 license for Community Edition binaries, containers, and images for Teleport Community Edition versions prior to Teleport 16.

The license of our open source repository remains AGPLv3 with no changes. Companies or individuals are welcome to compile the source code under AGPLv3 terms.

We are also keeping the Apache 2.0 license for our open source documentation and the client libraries code.

Why are we making this change?

Teleport is a for-profit business, and we are spending an increasing amount of time and expense maintaining the free Teleport Community Edition.

We are seeing growing interest and support requests in our community discussions forums from individuals and organizations.

There are thousands of people in our Slack channel with an ever-growing volume of support requests coming every day, many of them coming from companies that are many times our size.

We love helping out small teams and hobbyists with securing their environments, but we are not in a position to support large companies for free.

When does this change impact me?

The only case when this change impacts you is if you are a company using Teleport Community Edition and you have either more than 100 employees or more than $10MM in AR.

If you are an individual or a company with less than 100 employees and less than $10MM in AR, you can keep using Teleport Community Edition binaries and images as you have in the past with no changes. Otherwise, please reach out to our sales team.

Note: When compiling or cloning the Teleport code yourself, you obtain the Teleport software under AGPLv3 license and are subject to its license terms and restrictions.

If you are a current commercial customer and using our official binaries and client libraries, this does not impact you.

If you are an open source project or team, you can get a free Teleport cloud account via our ongoing secure open source infrastructure initiative.

I am an enterprise customer. How does this change affect me?

• If you are a customer of any Teleport offerings, there are no changes for you regardless of what official Teleport binaries or images you use.
• Teleport client libraries and documentation remain licensed under Apache 2.0. If you are using or vendoring our OSS client library code, there are no changes for you.

If you have any questions regarding this change, please reach out to our team at [email protected].