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.

Redox intends to be free forever, because we aim to be a foundational piece in creating secure and resilient systems.