Chapter 3: Licensing Model

Licensing Model

Source: chandra-banner.svg (Chandra Protocol's own official banner graphic, MIT LICENSE · v17.0 · General Reasoning, Inc. — the clearest first-party confirmation of the protocol's license and version seen so far); crcstandard.org homepage (live-fetched — "MIT LICENSE · v1.0 · GENERAL REASONING, INC."); chandrahub.net homepage (live-fetched); James, directly, confirming the split in exactly these terms: "Core is MIT. The enterprise version requires a commercial license."

Chandra's licensing follows a deliberate split, confirmed directly rather than inferred: the core (Chandra Protocol) is MIT-licensed; Chandra Enterprise requires a commercial license.

What's open (MIT-licensed)

• CRC (Chapter 5) — "CRC is published as an open standard... MIT License · v1.0 · General Reasoning, Inc." Anyone can read the standard, score their own stack against it, and implement it without a license from General Reasoning. The stated intent, in the standard's own words: "The goal is not General Reasoning's business — it is a regulated infrastructure posture that can actually survive the adversary that now exists."
• Chandra Protocol (Chapter 1) — MIT-licensed, confirmed directly on the protocol's own official banner (MIT LICENSE · v17.0 · General Reasoning, Inc.), and referenced as an open protocol throughout chandrahub.net's own framing ("Chandra is an open protocol for append-only, hash-chained, attributed audit records"). The protocol's data shape and governance principle are meant to be implementable by anyone, the same way CRC's scoring framework is. Note the version numbers are tracked independently — the protocol itself is at v17.0 as of this banner, while CRC (a separate, related standard) is at v1.0.

What's commercial

Chandra Enterprise requires a commercial license, stated directly. Chandra Enterprise (Chapter 2) and the surrounding operational tooling (Marshaller, Spine Editor, worker orchestration) are General Reasoning's proprietary product — this is the thing sold to compliance buyers, not given away under the same MIT terms as the core protocol it's built on. The distinction mirrors a common and well-understood pattern: the protocol is open so the industry can adopt its data shape and governance vocabulary without a gatekeeper, while the product that makes running it easy is the actual commercial offering.

What this split means practically

If you're deploying Chandra as a client: you are licensing Chandra Enterprise (and, per Chapter 10, ideally running it as your own sovereign deployment rather than depending on a shared instance) — but you are never locked into a proprietary audit format. Because CU structure and CRC scoring are open, an examiner (Chapter 10's audience) or a competing vendor can verify your compliance posture without needing a license from General Reasoning to understand what they're looking at. This is a meaningful claim precisely because it's unusual: most compliance tooling vendors have some incentive to make their own attestation format at least mildly proprietary, since that increases switching cost. CRC and Chandra Protocol being MIT-licensed removes that incentive structurally — General Reasoning's business model apparently depends on being the best implementation of an open standard, not on owning the standard itself.

If you're building on top of Chandra (Chapter 9's integration audience): the wire protocol you're calling is part of the commercial CEE product, not the open standard — Chapter 9's endpoint reference documents an interface to a licensed product, not a public API in the way CRC's scoring criteria are public. Nothing described in Chapter 9 is available royalty-free just because CRC is.

Open item for this chapter: the exact legal terms of CEE's commercial license (per-seat, per-instance, per-organization, usage-based) haven't been sourced from anything reviewed so far. This section should be expanded with real license text or pricing-page content once that exists, rather than left to speculation.