Continuity
What continues if Farnalabs stops operating, and what does not. Each claim about the license, the source or the documentation can be checked directly.
Short version
Farnalabs is a one-person company. If it disappeared tomorrow, the instance you run would keep running.
Nothing a running instance needs is held only by Farnalabs. There is no license server to call, no hosted service in the request path, and no build secret held by anyone. The Community tier needs no license key at all, the source is public, and the documentation lives in the same repository.
What you keep
Five things continue without Farnalabs.
Community, with no license
A deployment with no license key boots and runs on Community. Pipelines run, the audit chain keeps recording, and your data stays in your database. The continuity document records this property and names the code that implements it.
The right to modify the software and run what you modify
The license grants the right to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute the source. Its Additional Use Grant permits production use, including personal, internal and commercial use, of Modulo and of any modified version or derivative work you create. The field of use it withholds is offering Modulo, or a modified or derivative version of it, as a paid hosted or managed service to third parties that provides substantially the same functionality as Modulo. Modified copies and derivative works stay under the same license, so a patched version you run in production is covered. The terms are in LICENSE.
The source
The repository is public. Clone it, fork it, keep your own mirror of the tag you run.
The documentation
Deployment, upgrade, backup and continuity documentation is in docs/ inside the repository, so a clone carries its own recovery instructions.
Apache-2.0 for each release, three years after release
Each released version converts to the Apache License 2.0 three years after that version is first publicly released. The license calls this the Change Date and states the date for the version distributed with the file. See LICENSE.
What you lose
Three things stop. The page does not promise otherwise.
Team features, until you re-issue them
Team is unlocked by a signed license key with an expiry date. When the key lapses, the instance continues on Community and the Team capabilities switch off. Nothing is deleted, and the capabilities return when a valid key is installed. Re-issuing one yourself is covered below.
Farnalabs' patches and releases
No further patches, no release cadence and no maintenance commitment. If you need a fix after that point, you write it or commission it.
Support
Support ends, and there is no successor organisation to escalate to.
Recovering Team features
Team licenses are Ed25519-signed keys. The instance verifies a key locally against a single public key, the deployment's trust anchor, and does not contact Farnalabs to do it.
You do not need Farnalabs to issue the next key. Generate your own keypair, set your public key as the deployment's anchor, and sign your own Team license with the private key. The commands, and the two ways to install the key, are in Issue your own Team license.
Keep the anchor you use today. A license Farnalabs issued verifies only against the public key it was issued for. If you lose that public key, the license can no longer be verified, because re-issuing against it needs the private key, which Farnalabs holds. Moving to your own keypair removes that dependency.
Rebuilding from source
The compose deployment pulls an image that Farnalabs builds. Treat the image as a convenience, not a dependency: the same image builds from a checkout of the source with no credential from Farnalabs and no third-party license key.
Build the image from source gives the build command, the local tag that makes compose use your build instead of pulling, and the readiness probe that confirms the stack started.
Build once per release you intend to keep running, on your own infrastructure, so the command is known to work before you need it.
Why there is no successor
Farnalabs is a one-person company. There is no successor team and no second maintainer. That is the honest answer to the key-person question, and it is why this page promises no maintainer, no patch window and no support after the founder stops.
The continuity argument does not rest on a successor. It rests on the software and the license being complete without one: the source is public, the license permits modification and production use, the documentation ships in the repository, and the build needs no secret from us. Those are artefacts you can copy today.
What to keep
Store these with your infrastructure secrets, not in a ticket.
A clone of the repository at the release tag you run
It carries the license, the deployment documentation and the Dockerfile the recovery build uses.
Your Team license key and the public key it verifies against
The public key is the
MODULO_LICENSE_PUBLIC_KEYvalue the deployment uses. Both are text, and losing the public key loses the license. Store the private key too if you generated your own.A tested backup of the database and object storage
Continuity of the software is not continuity of the data. Backup and restore documents the tooling.
The Change Date of the version you run
It tells you when that version becomes Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.
Last reviewed: October 2026.