License

easywall is under the GNU General Public License, version 3. The full text is in the repository and at gnu.org. This page is what it means in practice; it is not legal advice, and where the two disagree the licence is what counts.

Running it

On your own machine	Yes. No conditions at all
At work, on company hardware	Yes. Commercial use is use
On a server other people reach	Yes. GPL-3.0 is not the AGPL — serving something over a network is not distribution
Modified, for yourself	Yes. A change you keep is yours and nobody has to see it
Paying nothing, telling nobody	Yes

Nothing on that list creates an obligation. That is the whole of it for almost everybody who reads this page.

Handing it to somebody else

Obligations begin at distribution — a binary, a package, a container image, a modified source tree, anything that leaves your hands.

You give them	You also owe them
An unmodified binary or package	The corresponding source, and this licence with it
A build with your changes in it	The same, including your changes, under GPL-3.0
A container image with easywall in it	The same. An image is a distribution of what is inside it

And in every case the copyright notices and the licence text stay where they are. You may charge for the distribution itself; the source that comes with it is not something you get to withhold or sell separately.

A network service is not distribution. Running a modified easywall for other people to use over HTTP does not oblige you to publish anything. That obligation is the AGPL’s, and easywall is not under it.

Contributing

A pull request is contributed under GPL-3.0, the same as the rest. There is no contributor licence agreement and nothing to sign — see Contributing.

Why this licence

easywall puts a web interface in front of a machine’s packet filter. Anyone running it is trusting the code with the one thing standing between their host and the network. A licence that lets a modified copy be handed on with the modification hidden is the wrong licence for that. GPL-3.0 means the version somebody hands you is a version you can read.