License

Olympus is distributed under the Olympus Free Container License v1.0 (OFCL). The OFCL is a source-available license, not a permissive open-source license. This page explains what it does and doesn't allow.

The canonical license text is the LICENSE.draft.md file in the platform repository. Note: as of this writing, the license is still labeled "draft." The summary on this page is provided for orientation; the license file itself is the authoritative document.

In plain English

You can:

• Deploy and operate the Olympus containers (and Canvas / SDK npm packages) for your own organization or your customers.
• Inspect the source code of any container image you have running, this is what most of the Internals section is for.
• Patch locally to fix bugs in your own deployment, and contribute those patches upstream.
• Self-host indefinitely without any per-user or per-MAU fees.

You cannot:

• Redistribute modified source code as a competing product, fork, or derivative distribution. The source is provided for transparency and local fixes, not for repackaging.
• Resell access to a hosted Olympus deployment as a turnkey identity SaaS without a separate commercial agreement.
• Strip the license headers or attribution notices.

If your intended use is not covered above, read the full license text or open a discussion on the platform repo.

Why source-available and not Apache-2.0?

Apache-2.0 (or MIT, or BSD-3-Clause) would allow any cloud provider to take the Olympus source, repackage it, and resell access, competing directly with the maintainer's own hosting plans. The OFCL preserves the option of running a commercial hosted Olympus while keeping the source readable for self-hosters.

This is the same shape used by Sentry's Functional Source License (FSL), Elastic's Elastic License v2, MongoDB's SSPL, and Sidekiq Pro. See ADR 0003, Source-Only Licensing for the full rationale.

What this means for these docs

The Internals section is written for licensees inspecting the containers they are running, not as a contributor onboarding guide for an open-source community. The framing matters:

• Internals docs assume you have a deployed Olympus and want to understand why a specific log line is emitted, why an env var is shaped a certain way, or what the data flow looks like when a flow times out.
• They do not assume you are about to write a pull request, though they are equally useful in that case.
• They link to specific commits and file paths so you can correlate the doc against your pinned image.

Architecturally, this is also why every page in the Reference section is generated from source, so the surface a licensee can inspect (the image they pulled) and the surface this site documents (the API reference) are always in lock-step.

Versioning of this license

The OFCL is currently at v1.0 (draft). Future versions of Olympus may move to a later OFCL version. The license that applies to your deployment is whichever version is present in the LICENSE file of the image you pulled.

You can determine the license version of a running container by:

podman exec olympus-athena-1 cat /app/LICENSE | head -5

Where next

• Develop, Inspecting Your Containers, how to read the source of a running container.
• ADR 0003, Source-Only Licensing, the decision record.
• LICENSE.draft.md on GitHub, the authoritative text.