Legal FAQ - Free-Use Limit (Placements) & BUSL-1.1 Additional Use Grant

Which commercial instrument (Q-17, 2026-09-16). Where this page says a use requires a commercial licence or arrangement, the instrument is the versioned Customer Agreement, issued at 1.0.0. The conditional wording on this page is a statement of licensing policy and is unchanged by that issue; what changed is that the instrument it points to now exists. No “Stella Ops Commercial Licence/EULA” document exists, and no surface may claim one.

Scope. This page summarises the free-use limit in Additional Use Grant §2 of LICENSE and answers common questions about it. LICENSE is authoritative. Nothing in the product counts or enforces the limit (§3).

Plugin developers: See PLUGIN_DEVELOPER_FAQ.mdfor plugin-specific licensing questions.

MSPs and SaaS providers: See SAAS_MSP_GUIDANCE.md for detailed hosting scenarios.

1 - What is free?

When you rely on the free grant, each Installation may manage no more than twenty (20) active Placements at any time, and you do not provide the Licensed Work to third parties as a hosted or managed service (Additional Use Grant §1 and §2). Capacity above twenty is available only where the Licensor expressly authorises it.

• Every capability and every update is available under the free grant. No feature is reserved for a paid plan. Updates means software releases, vulnerability-intelligence snapshots and Offline Kit packs for currently supported releases under the published support lifecycle. Free and paid Installations receive the same updates. Updates are not a promise to maintain every historical release indefinitely.
• The number of Environments is not limited.
• Evaluating, developing or testing Stella Ops itself is non-production use, which BUSL-1.1 permits independently of this grant; test Placements created for that purpose do not use up the free limit. Naming an Environment “development” does not by itself make the use non-production: if Stella Ops gates, promotes or deploys real releases there, those Placements count.
• The limit applies per Installation: one logical control-plane deployment. Cluster nodes, database replicas and failover components of the same deployment are one Installation. Independently operated Installations are counted separately.
• The grant adds to the rights BUSL-1.1 gives independently; it does not restrict them (Additional Use Grant §6).

2 - What is a Placement?

A Placement is one active Managed Workload–Environment relationship, identified consistently across releases and versions.

A Managed Workload is an application workload, either a container service or a native application workload of one or more deployable artifacts (for example deployed over SSH or WinRM), for which the Installation (a) gates, promotes or deploys releases, or (b) scans an image or deployable artifact, or applies the results of an earlier scan to it, while that image or artifact is installed as part of the workload in an Environment of the Installation.

A workload–Environment relationship can count when Stella deploys, gates or promotes its releases, scans its installed image or artifact, or applies an earlier scan result to that installed workload. Applying an earlier result does not require a new scan to run. Each qualifying relationship counts once, even when several of these activities apply.

The Installation applies the results of an earlier scan when it associates, presents or uses them as applicable scan information for a workload whose image or artifact is installed in one of its Environments. Keeping, retrieving, exporting or displaying a report only as historical evidence does not qualify, and neither does an operator’s own use of a report outside the Installation.

An image or deployable artifact is installed in an Environment when it forms part of a deployed workload assigned to that Environment, whether the workload is running or temporarily stopped. Storing it in a registry, cache, backup or unused local store is not installation, including after the workload has been removed. Scanning an image or artifact installed in no Environment does not, by itself, create a Placement. Where a qualifying scan or application of an earlier result concerns content installed in several workload–Environment relationships, each relationship counts separately; the digest identifies the content, not the workload or the Environment.

There is no per-scan charge. Scanning an installed workload’s image or artifact, or applying an earlier scan result to it, can bring that workload into the Placement count for each applicable Environment. Each workload–Environment relationship counts only once, regardless of the number of scans or reports.

Merely retaining or viewing a report solely as historical evidence does not create a Placement. Presenting an earlier result as applicable scan information for an installed workload counts as applying that result.

An Environment is a distinct release-control or deployment destination. A tenant, workspace or project does not create an extra Environment just because it is an organisational label.

These never add a Placement for the same workload in the same Environment: replicas, restarts, redeployments, image or version changes, multiple files that form one native workload, repeated scans and reports. A relationship that qualifies through more than one management activity counts once. Components of Stella Ops itself are not Placements. A Placement ends when all management of that workload in that Environment actually ends, or when the workload is removed and no other management activity keeps the relationship active. Completing a scan does not by itself end a Placement, and keeping historical evidence or reports does not, by itself, create, reactivate or keep a Placement active.

Inadvertent overage. An inadvertent excess over the applicable Placement capacity is additionally authorised for fourteen (14) days after you first become aware of it, provided you promptly reduce usage or obtain sufficient authorised capacity. This does not cover deliberate or repeated circumvention (Additional Use Grant §2).

3 - Does the product enforce the limit?

No. In the current release nothing counts, throttles or blocks use against the licence. There are no quota counters, no licence tokens, no delays and no licence telemetry. The limit is a licence condition that you observe and can self-attest (COMPLIANCE_ATTESTATION_FORM.md).

4 - How do I count my Placements?

Placements are recognised from the container hashes that the Installation observes in an Environment: through its own deployments, through the nodes and targets it creates or edits, and through vulnerability scans of a hash that is installed in that Environment or the application of an earlier scan result to it. Scanning an image or artifact installed in no Environment does not, by itself, create a Placement. Observations are evidence of a relationship, not its only source: deployment records, connected inventory and your supplementary declaration establish it, you must include qualifying relationships the automatic inventory does not reflect, and loss of observation alone does not show that a workload was removed. Withdrawing a workload from all management in an Environment ends its Placement there; keeping its history does not reactivate it.

The product does not yet report a Placement count. Until an automatic count covers every case, keep a supplementary placement inventory: the Placements that the product does not represent, such as a workload whose releases Stella Ops gates but another tool deploys. Today that means counting the (Environment, workload) pairs that each tenant’s deployed-estate view shows as deployed, adding the tenants of the Installation together, adding the supplementary inventory, and leaving out Stella Ops’ own components.

The placementCount field of the estate chain-completeness summary is not this count: it counts (environment, digest) pairs for evidence purposes.

5 - What if I need more than 20 Placements?

Production use outside the free grant requires the Licensor’s express written permission. It is given through an accepted order under the Customer Agreement that states the Installation, its authorised Placement capacity, the permitted use and the period (Additional Use Grant §4; the order template lists the fields). Contact sales@stella-ops.org. A standard Placement subscription authorises internal production use only; operating Stella Ops as a service for third parties needs express authorisation in the order.

Paid capacity is authorised for the subscription term. If the term ends without renewal, that paid permission ends: reduce the Installation to twenty Placements, renew, or rely on another permission. Nothing stops: delivered software keeps running, workloads are not touched and evidence is kept. The subscription adds no capability; every capability is already in the free grant.

Paid support reviews are described in the product support policy.

6 - Which release does this apply to?

BUSL-1.1 applies separately to each version of the Licensed Work. Each release is licensed under the LICENSE it ships with. The Placement grant takes effect with release v1.0.0-RC1-<YYYYMMDD> (date set at publication). Earlier releases, including the published v1.0.0 and v1.0.1 images, keep the grant they shipped with: no more than three Environments and no more than one hundred New Hash Scans in any rolling 24-hour period, per Installation. Nothing already distributed is withdrawn.

The Licensor also permits recipients of those earlier versions to use them under the Placement grant instead, as a whole and not combined with the earlier grant: see the additional permission for earlier versions. Neither grant is always more generous:

Earlier texts are kept as distributed. Where they differ, for example the Community Plugin Grant Addendum 1.0.0 statement of 999 Scans per calendar day, the Licensor corrects the difference prospectively and assesses a recipient’s actual grant before asserting non-compliance.

7 - Can I redistribute a modified Stella Ops?

Yes, provided you:

1. Include the LICENSE and NOTICE files with your distribution, and
2. Mark modified files with prominent change notices.

Recipients are still bound by BUSL-1.1 and the Additional Use Grant; production use outside the grant requires the Licensor’s agreement.

8 - Embedding in a proprietary appliance

You may ship Stella Ops inside a hardware or virtual appliance under BUSL-1.1. You must include LICENSE and NOTICE and preserve attribution notices. Production use must remain within the Additional Use Grant unless the Licensor agrees otherwise. Proprietary integration code does not have to be disclosed.

9 - SaaS redistribution

The BUSL-1.1 Additional Use Grant prohibits providing Stella Ops as a hosted or managed service to third parties. SaaS/hosted use requires a separate written agreement with the Licensor.

See Also

• PLUGIN_DEVELOPER_FAQ.md- Plugin development and distribution questions
• SAAS_MSP_GUIDANCE.md - SaaS and MSP hosting scenarios
• ENFORCEMENT_TELEMETRY_POLICY.md - Audit and telemetry details
• COMPLIANCE_ATTESTATION_FORM.md - Self-attestation process
• LICENSE-ADDENDUM-COMMUNITY-PLUGIN-GRANT.md - Full addendum text
• ../product/OFFER.md - Current offer, including subscription and support-review prices

10 - Change-log