Our Philosophy

Redox OS is predominately MIT X11-style licensed, including all software, documentation, and fonts. There are only a few exceptions to this, which are all licensed under other compatible open source licenses.

The MIT X11-style license has the following properties:

  • It gives you, the user of the software, complete and unrestrained access to the software, such that you may inspect, modify, and redistribute your changes
    • Inspection Anyone may inspect the software for security vulnerabilities
    • Modification Anyone may modify the software to fix security vulnerabilities
    • Redistribution Anyone may redistribute the software to patch the security vulnerabilities
  • It is compatible with GPL licenses - Projects licensed as GPL can be distributed with Redox OS
  • It allows for the incorporation of GPL-incompatible free software, such as OpenZFS, which is CDDL licensed

The license does not restrict the software that may run on Redox, however -- and thanks to the microkernel architecture, even traditionally tightly-coupled components such as drivers can be distributed separately, so maintainers are free to choose whatever license they like for their projects.