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·5 min read

AGPL server, MIT edges: why the licence splits

The ingest and dashboard are AGPL-3.0 so improvements flow back. The tracker, middleware, MCP, and skills are MIT so embedding them never licenses your product.

Open sourceLicence

Two antique keys on black velvet, one gold-toned and one silver
Two keys on purpose. One opens the server. The other you can copy.

A single licence is simpler to print. It is worse to use. If the 1 KB tracker were AGPL, every site that pasted the script would inherit a conversation with a lawyer. If the server were MIT, a hosted clone could close the source of the ingest path — the one place visitor data actually lives.

So the split is load-bearing. apps/api and apps/web are AGPL-3.0. packages/tracker, middleware, mcp, and skills are MIT. Vector 5 is a clean-room project: not a fork, not affiliated with Plausible, none of their code or assets.

  • Read every line that touches a visitor.
  • Embed the edges in Next, Express, Hono, Workers, or Node without the AGPL following you out.
  • If you improve the server, the improvement is for everyone who runs it.
Licence the edges for adoption. Licence the vault for reciprocity.