I work on HyCanvas at HyScaler, so read this as the maintainers' side of the story.

HyCanvas is a browser design tool in the Canva space: social graphics, slide decks, video editing, whiteboards, docs and sheets, with real-time collaboration. It ships as one Go binary with the web app embedded, and PostgreSQL is its only required service.

On October 15 we released v0.3.17, and with it the license changed. Everything up to v0.3.16 was under the Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2). From v0.3.17 onwards the code is under the GNU Affero General Public License v3, AGPL-3.0-only .

This post covers what ELv2 did and did not allow, why we moved, why we picked the AGPL over a permissive license, and the question everyone asks next: the CLA.

What ELv2 allowed, and what it didn't

ELv2 is a short, readable license, and for most people running HyCanvas it was fine. You could read the code, run it, modify it and self-host it.…