BUSL-1.1 (source-available)

What the licence permits

BUSL-1.1 is source-available, not open source. Its Additional Use Grant permits free production use — real production, not evaluation only — for each installation:

How the grant counts placements

• A managed placement is one active relationship between a managed workload and an environment of the installation, identified the same way across releases and versions.
• A managed workload is a container service, or a native application workload made of one or more deployable artifacts, for which your installation either (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 one of your environments. Gating or promoting a release that another tool deploys counts the same as deploying it.
• An image or artifact is installed in an environment when it is part of a deployed workload assigned to that environment, whether the workload is running or temporarily stopped. Keeping it in a registry, cache, backup or unused local store is not installation, even when the files remain after the workload has been removed or retired.
• Your 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 your environments. Retaining, retrieving, exporting or displaying a report only as historical evidence does not qualify, and your own reading or use of a report outside the installation does not, by itself, qualify either.
• Replicas, restarts, redeployments, new versions and the several files of one native workload add no placements, and repeated scans and reports add none to a relationship already counted. A qualifying scan, or a qualifying application of earlier results, can bring a relationship not yet counted into the count; a relationship that qualifies through more than one activity counts once. Stella Ops' own components are not placements.
• When a qualifying scan or application of earlier results concerns an image or artifact installed in more than one workload–environment relationship, each relationship counts separately. Digests identify the installed content; they do not replace the workload or environment identity. Scanning an image or artifact installed in none of your environments does not, by itself, create a placement.
• Installed relationships may be established from deployment records, connected inventory or your own declaration, and you must include every qualifying relationship in your count, including those the automatic inventory does not show. If your installation stops observing a workload, that alone does not show it has been uninstalled or withdrawn from management.
• 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. Finishing a scan does not end it, and retaining historical evidence or reports does not, by itself, create, reactivate or keep a placement.
• An installation is one logical control-plane deployment operated by or for one legal entity: cluster nodes, database replicas and failover components of the same deployment count together, and independently operated deployments are separate installations.

An inadvertent excess over the free 20 placements or over your subscribed capacity is permitted for 14 days after you notice it, while you reduce usage or order capacity. It does not cover deliberate or repeated circumvention.

• Above 20 placements: production use requires a Licensed plan for a placement capacity at least equal to the placements you manage, under the Stella Ops Customer Agreement.
• No hosted service for third parties: the free grant never covers running Stella Ops Suite as a SaaS, managed service or service bureau for anyone outside your own organisation, at any size. That needs the licensor's express written authorisation in an order under the Stella Ops Customer Agreement.
• Change Date: 2030-01-20, or four years after a version's first public release, whichever comes first.

Earlier versions: each version keeps the licence it shipped with, and recipients of an earlier version may also choose the new grant, under an additive permission published with the release.

Source Available

The Stella source code is available under BUSL-1.1. You can inspect, audit, and verify every line of code that runs in your environment.

• Audit the code yourself
• Build from source if needed
• Plugin development and sale are permitted, provided the plugin does not include, copy or modify Licensed Work source code.

Procurement FAQ

Vendor security review →