License

Chinaski’s core is MIT-licensed: free as in freedom, with the obligations of the standard MIT terms. This page sets out the license and the project’s stated direction for commercial add-ons.

The core: MIT

Use, run, modify, and study the software for any purpose, commercial or otherwise.
Redistribute copies, including inside products or services you sell.
Build proprietary things on top of it without licensing fees.

The strings that come with it:

The copyright notice and permission notice must stay intact in copies or substantial portions of the software.
The software is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied terms of merchantability, fitness, and non-infringement are disclaimed, and neither the authors nor copyright holders are liable for claims or damages.

The complete grant text is in the LICENSE file at the repo root.

What the MIT license means in practice

Self-hosting and client deployments: install it on your own servers or clients’ servers without fees.
Modifications: edit anything: templates, plugins-as-module-patches, the builder itself.
Selling services built around it (hosting management, website production for agencies) is expressly permitted.
The only real condition: keep the notice linkage in copy/distribute paths.

Dependencies

The Perl dependencies Chinaski installs (Mojolicious, DBI, Template Toolkit, Imager, and friends) each carry their own upstream licenses; packaging them as Debian packages is a distribution-layer matter. Nothing on this page covers those components’ licenses; consult the upstream projects as needed.

Attribution in your deployment

The copyright notice stays in place if you redistribute modified copies; the standard MIT conditions are the limit of your obligations: no copyleft recursion, no source-required obligations on transformed content.