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Licensing Strategy: FOSS (bloqr-core) vs. Commercial (bloqr-compiler)

Status: Active standard — relicensing of bloqr-core is in progress, see docs/legal/LICENSE-DRAFT.md and its tracking issue. This doc explains the relationship, not the mechanics of the swap itself.

The model

Bloqr operates two related but license-distinct codebases:

  • bloqr-core (this repo) — source-available, free for non-commercial use. Anyone can read, audit, fork, and use it to produce their own output (a compiled filter list, a hostlist, a configuration) and give that output away for free, including as a business or professional entity. What's restricted is monetizing the Software or its output — selling it, paywalling it, or building a revenue-generating product/service around it — without a commercial license from Bloqr Systems.
  • bloqr-compiler (BloqrAI/bloqr-compiler, private) — the commercial, hosted "Compiler-as-a-Service" product: AGTree-powered multi-syntax AST parsing/translation across AdGuard, uBlock Origin, and Adblock Plus formats, deployable on Cloudflare Workers/Deno Deploy/Vercel Edge/AWS Lambda@Edge, with metered API billing. Licensed under its own source-available commercial license and commercial license agreement template.

Different licenses, same underlying philosophy: free to use, audit, and build on for non-commercial purposes; commercial use requires a license from Bloqr Systems, who retains unlimited rights to its own software. bloqr-core's license is adapted from bloqr-compiler's rather than copied verbatim, because bloqr-core ships as source you run yourself — it has no hosted component to meter usage through, so the SaaS-API-billing and proxy-metering commercial paths that make sense for bloqr-compiler don't apply here.

Why they're kept separate, not one license for both

  • bloqr-compiler's commercial value (the AGTree AST engine, multi-syntax translation, hosted CaaS infrastructure, billing) is deliberately not present in bloqr-core. @bloqr/compiler-core's own source comments document this: it was extracted from bloqr-compiler's core specifically without @adguard/agtree and without the Workers/CaaS-specific code (see src/compilers/typescript/src/transformations/ValidateTransformation.ts and src/compilers/typescript/src/utils/RuleUtils.ts, both of which reference the companion decoupling effort tracked as bloqr-compiler#2200).
  • Keeping the license text specific to what each repo actually contains avoids promising enforcement mechanisms (like API metering) that bloqr-core structurally cannot provide, and avoids importing bloqr-compiler-specific commercial terms (SaaS pricing tiers, proxy billing) that have no equivalent here.
  • This split also matters for the "no infectious licenses" goal (see CLAUDE.md's Operational Notes): bloqr-core deliberately avoids copyleft (GPL/AGPL/LGPL) third-party dependencies so that adopting a Bloqr-authored restrictive-but-open license isn't undermined by a dependency's own copyleft terms forcing broader disclosure than intended. See the dependency license compatibility audit (tracked separately, modeled on bloqr-compiler's own DEPENDENCY_LICENSE_COMPATIBILITY.md).
  • MPL-2.0 specifically confirmed compatible (#434): evaluated whether an MPL-2.0-licensed dependency (BloqrAI/bloqr-enginelib, a fork of Brave's adblock-rust) could be taken as a dependency of this repo's GPL-3.0 code. MPL-2.0 is file-level weak-copyleft; its §3.3 "Larger Works" provision explicitly permits distributing a combined work containing MPL-licensed files under a secondary license, including GPL, without the GPL license "infecting" the MPL files or vice versa. This finding was confirmed but the crate was not ultimately adopted — see docs/adr/0005-browser-syntax-validation-engine.md for why (a toolchain incompatibility, not a license one). The finding itself remains valid and reusable for any future MPL-2.0 dependency decision.

Current state (as of this doc)

  • bloqr-core's root LICENSE file says MIT. ~25 other files across the repo (workspace Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml, most compiler README.md files, several docs/*.md, the website's package.json and footer) say GPL-3.0. Neither is the intended final state — both predate this licensing-strategy decision. The intended replacement is docs/legal/LICENSE-DRAFT.md, pending review.
  • Every published package (@bloqr/compiler-core on JSR; bloqr-validator-core, bloqr-validator-core-cli, bloqr-compiler on crates.io; Bloqr.Compiler.Abstractions, Bloqr.Compiler.Core on NuGet via GitHub Packages) currently carries GPL-3.0 in its own registry metadata. Already-published versions are immutable on their registries, so a repo-wide relicense doesn't retroactively change what's already out there — see the open questions in LICENSE-DRAFT.md for what that implies for the rollout.

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