“Open source” has become a word you have to check. In this category it frequently means a real open-source licence with restrictions bolted onto the end of it. Klorn's LICENSE is the GNU AGPL v3 and then it stops.
| What you might worry about | Klorn | Where to check |
|---|---|---|
| Terms added after the licence text | None | Read LICENSE — 235 lines, the GNU text and its standard section 7 |
| A restriction on commercial use | None | No such clause exists in the file |
| A clause that triggers at N employees | None | No such clause exists in the file |
| How GitHub resolves the licence | AGPL-3.0 | The repository API's license.spdx_id field |
| Features held back from the source | None in the core | docs/EDITIONS.md draws the line |
| Whether self-host is a second-class path | Same classifier, same enforcement | docs/self-hosting.md |
Klorn Cloud sells managed hosting, a Google-verified Gmail scope, uptime and incident response. It does not sell a better classifier. The attention firewall, the content-hash binding that ties every classification to the exact bytes that produced it, and the receipt enforcement on send, permanent delete and forward-external are identical on both editions — because they are the same code.
If you self-host, you bring your own Google OAuth client, your own Postgres, and your own model key or a local model. With a local model configured, message text never leaves your machine.
The moat is the doctrine and the implementation discipline, not the licence. AGPL is here so that a hosted fork cannot strip the source and re-sell the firewall as a closed service without contributing back. If you self-host for yourself, the AGPL changes nothing about what you do.
And having chosen a copyleft licence, we did not then undermine it by appending terms. A licence you have to negotiate is not one of the freedoms AGPL was written to protect.
Verify rather than trust. Every claim on this page is a file you can open. If you find one that does not hold, that is a bug in this page and we want to hear about it.
Klorn is early. The repository is honest about what is solid and what is stitched — the CHANGELOG and the “What it's NOT” section of the README are the places we keep that list.