Project, licensing, and governance
Risk-averse teams evaluate licensing before features. This page states the license of every Pantacor-authored project the documentation covers, so the open-source boundary is explicit.
Licensing model
Pantacor publishes a simple licensing scheme (source: the canonical
pantacor/licensing repository):
- Pantavisor code that runs on the device → MIT.
- Backend services → Apache-2.0 (adds an explicit patent grant).
MIT on the device gives commercial product teams maximum flexibility with no
copyleft obligations on their own application containers. Every project ships a
top-level LICENSE/COPYING file with the full license text — treat that file
as authoritative for the project (see the verified per-project table below).
Per-project licenses
Licenses verified against each project's repository:
| Project | Role | License | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pantavisor | On-device supervisor / PID 1 | MIT | github.com/pantavisor/pantavisor |
| meta-pantavisor | Yocto BSP layer (builds the on-device system) | MIT | github.com/pantavisor/meta-pantavisor |
| pvr | CLI for inspecting/building/deploying revisions | Apache-2.0 | github.com/pantacor/pvr |
| pvr-sdk | SDK container/tooling around pvr | MIT | gitlab.com/pantacor/pv-platforms/pvr-sdk |
| Pantahub (pantahub-base) | Hub backend / device API server | Apache-2.0 | github.com/pantacor/pantahub-base |
Open source vs. the hosted service
The code above is fully open source — including pantahub-base, the Hub
backend (Apache-2.0). What is commercial is the hosted Pantacor Hub
service (the managed fleet/device-management offering at
pantacor.com), not the license of the code. You can
self-host the open components; the commercial relationship is the managed
service and support, not a closed core.
Bundled third-party components
A built Pantavisor image also contains upstream components that keep their own licenses — for example the container runtime and base userland:
| Component | Typical license |
|---|---|
| LXC (Pantavisor's build) | LGPL-2.1-or-later (some bundled tools GPL-2.0) |
BusyBox (busybox-pv) | GPL-2.0 |
libthttp | MIT |
kas (build tool) | MIT |
These are not Pantacor-authored, and their terms govern the corresponding files
in an image. To enumerate the exact components and licenses in any image you
ship, enable Yocto's create-spdx class in your meta-pantavisor build (e.g.
INHERIT += "create-spdx" in local.conf) to generate a per-image SPDX
SBOM.
Licenses can change between releases. For any image you redistribute, treat the
generated SBOM and each project's top-level LICENSE file as the authoritative
source, not this summary.