Outline
Fast, polished team wiki.
Building on it: what may you do?
Short answers based on the licence, for the version in the catalog.
- B1 Change the code for internal use in your company Yes, with conditions Usually, for internal use. Check the terms.
- B2 Build your own product or service on top and offer it to customers as SaaS No Usually no for a service that competes with the vendor, without an agreement.
- B3 Make a closed-source derivative and sell or distribute it No No, not without an agreement with the vendor.
- B4 Use the project's name and trademark No No, not without permission. The licence covers the code, not the name or logo.
Keep in mind
- There is a licence note for this product (e.g. parts under another licence or version-specific terms): read it and check the licence of the exact version you use.
This is guidance, not legal advice. Check with a lawyer before deciding.
The licence in brief
Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1)
Source-available, not OSI open source. The project's Additional Use Grant decides; a competing or hosted service is often forbidden. Becomes open on a Change Date.
BSL-1.1 forbidding a 'Document Service' (letting third parties create teams). Becomes Apache-2.0 on 2030-09-09. Internal self-hosting is OK; offering it hosted to customers needs a commercial licence.
This is guidance, not legal advice (inte juridisk rådgivning). Check with a lawyer before deciding.
Facts
- Licence
- BUSL-1.1
- Licence type
- Source-available (not OSI)
- Open core
- No
- GitHub stars
- 40.8k
- Latest activity
- Deployment
- Docker
- Login/SSO
- OIDC, Google, Microsoft, Slack
- API
- REST
- Multi-tenant
- Teams
- EU vendor
- No
- Source code
- github.com/outline/outline
- Source
- GitHub API, fetched 2026-10-03
Licence analysis per use case
Sign in to see what the licence means for eight use cases – from internal self-hosting to offering the tool as a service.
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