The SDK, the file format and the viewer are Apache-2.0. Hub — hosted storage, sharing, team workspaces — is paid. People ask where that line came from, and whether it will move.
The argument for the core being open
A debugger occupies a specific position: when your system misbehaves, it is the thing you use to decide what is true. If you cannot inspect it, you are asked to trust a black box about the behaviour of another black box.
Second, and more practically: recordings outlive vendors. A team recording a robot fleet today may need to open those files in eight years. If the only reader is a proprietary binary, that is a bet on our corporate longevity. An open format and an open reader make it a bet on nothing.
The argument for Hub being paid
Hub is where the costs are actually incurred — storage, bandwidth, servers. Charging for the thing that costs money is more honest than charging for the library and giving away the servers.
It also keeps the incentives clean. If we monetised the SDK, we would be tempted to make the free viewer worse. Because we monetise the server, our incentive is for the local tools to be as good as possible.
The commitment, precisely
- Released versions stay Apache-2.0. A licence cannot be retroactively revoked, and we would not try.
- The file format spec stays public and versioned.
- Hub exports to standard
.dlrfiles at any time, with one command.
What we do not promise is that every future feature lands in the open core. Things that only make sense with a server — cross-recording search, shared annotations — will live in Hub. That is the line: if it runs on your machine, it is open.