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2026

Sustainable Use License

Also known as SUL, Sustainable Use License 1.0.

Commercial use
the record does not say
Share alike
required
Attribution
required (keep the copyright and license notices)
Compare with… Add to the compatibility check Download JSON-LD Turtle RDF/XML Text

Write this as a license text (needs an account) DALICC reads the model above and writes what it permits, requires and prohibits in plain English. Without an account, the Text download above writes the model out from the vocabulary.

Canonical URI https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/Sustainable-Use-License

Permissions

  • Derivative works from the text Distributing an adaptation of the work and making it available to the public.
  • Derive from the text Creating a new work from the work, such as a translation, adaptation or arrangement of it or of a part of it.

    Duties

    • Modification notice from the text Marking a changed work as changed, saying how it differs from the original and keeping earlier notices of change.
    • Notice from the text Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
    • Share alike from the text Adaptations have to be licensed under the same license or one the license names as compatible.
  • Distribute from the text Providing copies of the work to the public or to anyone else.

    Duties

    • Notice from the text Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
    • Share alike from the text Adaptations have to be licensed under the same license or one the license names as compatible.
  • Modified works from the text Distributing a modified version of the work that does not amount to a new, derivative work.
  • Modify from the text Altering the work, for example by updating it, without creating a new work; an alteration that creates a new work is Derive.

    Duties

    • Modification notice from the text Marking a changed work as changed, saying how it differs from the original and keeping earlier notices of change.
    • Notice from the text Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
    • Share alike from the text Adaptations have to be licensed under the same license or one the license names as compatible.
  • Patent grant from the text Granting a license under the patent claims that a contributor holds and that the contribution necessarily infringes.
  • Reproduce from the text The text says: "The licensor grants you a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, non-sublicensable, non-transferable license to use, copy, distribute, make available, and prepare derivative works of the software, in each case subject to the limitations below." Making copies of the work in any form.

Prohibitions

  • Change license from the text Not permitted: Change license. Replacing the license of the work, or of an adaptation, with another license, or changing its terms.
  • Charge distribution fee from the text Not permitted: Charge distribution fee. The text says: "You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes." Charging a fee for the act of providing a copy of the work to someone else.
  • Charge license fee from the text Not permitted: Charge license fee. The text says: "You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes." Charging a fee for granting someone a license to the work.
  • Exempted material from the text Not permitted: Exempted material. The text says: ""master") are not licensed. - Source code files that contain ".ee." in their filename or ".ee" in their dirname are NOT licensed under the Sustainable Use License." Using material that the license carves out of its grant, such as personal data, official insignia, third-party rights or material under a separate license.
  • Promote from the text Not permitted: Promote. Using the name or trademarks of the licensor or of contributors to endorse or promote a product.
  • Sublicense from the text Not permitted: Sublicense. Granting a third party rights in the work under a license of the licensee's own, rather than passing on the original license.

License-wide duties

This license states no duties that apply to the work as a whole.

What applies by default

The statements above are the library's reading of this license: each is marked with the sentence it rests on, or as a library convention where the text is not explicit. The statements below are the ones the DALICC reasoner supplies for acts the license says nothing about, from the default rules of the dependency graph it reasons with. Each one names the legal source it rests on. None of it is in the record.

No default rule of that graph reaches this license: it speaks about every act the rules are about.

Further terms

These are the things the license says about itself beyond the acts it permits, forbids and requires: when it ends, how long there is to put a breach right, which law governs it, and so on. A term that comes from the DALICC vocabulary links to its definition.

Patent license ends if you sue
Yes. Not a ban on suing: a patent claim over the work ends the patent license, or the whole license, as the text provides.
Cure period
30 days
Field of use restriction
your own internal business purposes, or non-commercial or personal use, with distribution only free of charge and for non-commercial purposes
Terminates on breach
Yes

Clauses

Warranty disclaimer

As far as the law allows, the software comes as is, without any warranty or condition, and the licensor will not be liable to you for any damages arising out of these terms or the use or nature of the software, under any kind of legal claim.

Additional clauses

Source code files that contain ".ee." in their filename or ".ee" in their dirname are NOT licensed under the Sustainable Use License.

Info

Target asset types
Software
Region / jurisdiction
Worldwide
Validity
Perpetual
Source
https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md
Legal code
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/n8n-io/n8n/master/LICENSE.md
This description is published under
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Publisher
n8n
SPDX identifier
SUL (provisional, the record declares none)
Version
1.0
DALICC identifier
Sustainable-Use-License

This record is published under CC BY 4.0. Credit it as: DALICC License Library, DALICC - Verein zur Förderung der Rechtssicherheit in der Datenbewirtschaftung, https://dalicc.net, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The license it describes belongs to its publisher.

Use this license

Everything below is generated from this record. Replace the example address with the address of your own work.

JSON sidecar 

{
  "license-uri": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/Sustainable-Use-License",
  "license-title": "Sustainable Use License",
  "spdx-id": null,
  "asset": null,
  "generated-by": "DALICC"
}

RDF, Turtle 

@prefix cc: <http://creativecommons.org/ns#> .

<https://example.org/my-work>
    cc:license <https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/Sustainable-Use-License> .

RDF, JSON-LD 

{
  "@context": {
    "cc": "http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
  },
  "@id": "https://example.org/my-work",
  "cc:license": {
    "@id": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/Sustainable-Use-License"
  }
}

This license carries no attribution duty, so no credit line is offered here.

Badge DALICC badge for Sustainable Use License

Markdown 

[![License: Sustainable Use License](https://dalicc.net/license-library/Sustainable-Use-License/badge.svg)](https://dalicc.net/license-library/Sustainable-Use-License)

HTML 

<a href="https://dalicc.net/license-library/Sustainable-Use-License"><img src="https://dalicc.net/license-library/Sustainable-Use-License/badge.svg" alt="License: Sustainable Use License"></a>

Review

Written from the license text by
Giray Havur
Written on
2026-09-22
Second review
not yet done
Record changed since this review
yes (version 2, 2026-09-24)
Findings
11 recorded, 8 applied to the record, 0 proposed

The record models the Sustainable Use License, version 1.0, written on the same skeleton as the Elastic License 2.0. The grant is the same but the limitation is different in kind: you may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use, and you may pass it on only free of charge and for non-commercial purposes. It is not an open source licence, and the file that publishes it also carves out the source files marked as enterprise code.

11 findings

  • info Rubric 1 spdx:licenseId applied

    File name, record identifier and IRI local name agree. The triple is left out: the SPDX list does not carry this licence and no identifier is invented. cc:legalcode points at the file the publisher ships and dct:source at the same file's page.

  • info Rubric 2 odrl:target applied

    dcmitype:Software only. The text speaks of source code files and of the software.

  • major Rubric 3 odrl:permission applied

    'The licensor grants you a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, non-sublicensable, non-transferable license to use, copy, distribute, make available, and prepare derivative works of the software.' That gives odrl:reproduce, odrl:distribute, odrl:modify, odrl:derive, cc:DerivativeWorks and dalicc:ModifiedWorks, and the Patents section gives dalicc:patentGrant.

  • minor Rubric 3 cc:CommercialUse applied

    cc:CommercialUse is left unstated. The Limitations section allows use 'for your own internal business purposes', which a company may well do to earn money, and at the same time allows passing the software on only 'free of charge for non-commercial purposes'. The text draws its line around the act rather than around the character of the use, so the line is carried by the two fee prohibitions and by dalicc:fieldOfUseRestriction, and the clause is quoted.

  • major Rubric 4 odrl:prohibition applied

    dalicc:chargeDistributionFee and dalicc:chargeLicenseFee for 'You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge'. dalicc:sublicense for 'non-sublicensable'. dalicc:ChangeLicense for 'These terms do not imply any licenses other than those expressly granted in these terms', read with the Notices section. dalicc:promote because no trademark rights are granted. dalicc:patentRetaliationTermination for the written-claim sentence. dalicc:exemptedMaterial for the carve-out at the head of the file: 'Source code files that contain ".ee." in their filename or ".ee" in their dirname are NOT licensed under the Sustainable Use License.' That is the same use of the term as on OGL-UK-2.0 and NLOD-2.0, material outside the grant.

  • major Rubric 5 odrl:duty applied

    cc:Notice and cc:ShareAlike on odrl:distribute for 'You must ensure that anyone who gets a copy of any part of the software from you also gets a copy of these terms', with dalicc:modificationNotice added on odrl:modify and odrl:derive for the prominent-notice sentence.

  • major Rubric 6 dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer applied

    The No Liability section is one sentence covering warranty and liability, quoted whole into dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer as in CAL-1.0 and Elastic-2.0. Eight further clauses are quoted in dalicc:additionalClauses, including the carve-out paragraphs that open the file.

  • major Rubric 7 dalicc:terminatesOnBreach applied

    dalicc:terminatesOnBreach is true and dalicc:curePeriod is '30 days'. cc:jurisdiction stays dalicc:worldwide and the text names no governing law.

  • gap Rubric 8 dalicc:fieldOfUseRestriction none

    'Your own internal business purposes' has no term. dalicc:fieldOfUseRestriction is the nearest literal and the clause is quoted. Proposed term: dalicc:internalUseOnly, a duty action for a licence that confines the licensee to use inside its own organization, which several source-available texts need.

  • info Rubric 9 record none

    The consistency check of app.services.composer, run against licensedata/dependencygraph/dg_default.ttl, returned no conflicts. Prohibiting both fee actions raises nothing, because neither odrl:sell nor odrl:commercialize is permitted in this record.

  • major Rubric 10 record none

    Against Elastic-2.0 this record keeps the grant, the patent terms, the notice duties and the termination clause word for word, and differs in the limitation: two fee prohibitions and a field-of-use restriction here, a hosted-service bar and a licence-key clause there. It is the only record in this set that carries dalicc:exemptedMaterial.

Report an issue The review record as JSON The review checks the model against the license text. It is not legal advice.

History

This license model has 2 versions. Version 2 is the one served today; every earlier version keeps its own address, so a conclusion drawn from one of them can still be checked against it.

  1. Version 2 current2026-09-24 Giray Havur

    The changes since version 1 recorded which sentence of the text each statement rests on, named the license the record itself is published under and removed the quotes that do not name the act they support.

    View JSON-LD Turtle RDF/XML

    7 changes

    • changed permission odrl:reproduce

      was permission odrl:reproduce

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "The licensor grants you a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, non-sublicensable, non-transferable license to use, copy, distribute, make available, and prepare derivative works of the software, in each case subject to the limitations below."

    • changed prohibition dalicc:ChangeLicense

      was prohibition dalicc:ChangeLicense

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "These terms do not imply any licenses other than those expressly granted in these terms."

    • changed prohibition dalicc:chargeDistributionFee

      was prohibition dalicc:chargeDistributionFee

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes."

    • changed prohibition dalicc:chargeLicenseFee

      was prohibition dalicc:chargeLicenseFee

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes."

    • changed prohibition dalicc:exemptedMaterial

      was prohibition dalicc:exemptedMaterial

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: ""master") are not licensed. - Source code files that contain ".ee." in their filename or ".ee" in their dirname are NOT licensed under the Sustainable Use License."

    • added dct:license <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>

      Manual edit Every record is published under CC BY 4.0. cc:license names the record DALICC keeps of that licence; dct:license now names it by the address Creative Commons publishes it at, so that a consumer matching the canonical IRI finds it.

    • changed prohibition dalicc:ChangeLicense

      was prohibition dalicc:ChangeLicense

      Manual edit Removed the quoted evidence of prohibition dalicc:ChangeLicense: the quoted sentence does not name the act. The statements stay, read from the text without a linked quote.

  2. Version 1

    Created from the license text on 2026-09-22 (Source-available licences and riders).

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Every change names the reason behind it: a finding of the content review, one of its library-wide decisions, the metadata that review wrote onto every record, or a hand edit. None of it is legal advice.

Nothing on this page is legal advice. What a license means is decided by its text; ask a legal advisor before you rely on it.