Changing Tart License¶
TLDR: We are transitioning Tart's licensing from AGPL-3.0 to Fair Source 100. This change will permit unlimited installations on personal computers, but organizations that exceed a certain number of server installations utilizing 100 CPU cores will be required to obtain a paid sponsorship.
Background¶
Exactly a year ago on February 11th 2022 we started working on Tart – a tiny CLI to run macOS virtual machines on Apple Silicon. Three months later we successfully started using Tart in our own production system and decided to share Tart with everyone.
The goal was to establish a community of users and contributors to transform Tart from a small CLI to a robust tool for various scenarios. Unfortunately, we were not successful in attracting a significant number of contributors. It's important to note that we did have seven individuals who contributed to the development of Tart to the best of their abilities. However, one of the challenges of contributing to Tart is that the skill set required for a contribution is vastly different from the skill set typically possessed by regular Tart users in their daily work. Specifically, a contributor needs to have knowledge of the Swift programming language, as well as a background in operating systems and network stack. This is the reason why 98.8% of the code and all the major features were contributed by Cirrus Labs engineers.