A Fresh Start: New License, Clean History

If you look at any of Gryt's repositories right now, the git history starts today. One commit. No years of development logs, no experimental branches, no record of the hundreds of iterations it took to get here. That's on purpose, and it's because of the license.

I changed the license

Gryt was originally released under the MIT license, the "do whatever you want" license. At the time, it felt like the obvious choice. I wanted Gryt to be open, accessible, and easy for anyone to use.

But as the project grew and I thought more carefully about the future, I realized MIT wasn't protecting the project the way I needed it to. MIT means anyone, including companies, can take the entire codebase, close it off, build a commercial product on top of it, and never contribute a single line back. That's not what I want for Gryt.

So I moved to the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). It's still open source. You can still read the code, self-host it, modify it, and contribute. The difference is:

• If you modify Gryt and distribute it, you have to share those modifications under the same license.
• If you run a modified version as a public service, you have to make the source code available to your users.
• If you want to use Gryt commercially without those obligations, you need a commercial license.

You can read the full details on the licensing page.

Why the history starts today

When I switched licenses, every old commit still carried the MIT license. That's how git works: you can't retroactively change the license on past commits. Anyone checking out an old commit would get MIT-licensed code.

Since the project is still in early development with no external contributors or forks, I decided to start fresh. A single initial commit, clean history, AGPL-3.0 from day one. No ambiguity, no confusion about which license applies to what.

If Gryt had a large community of contributors and users, I wouldn't have done this. It would break too many workflows and violate too much trust. But at this stage, it was the right call.

Gryt has been in development since early 2022. Over those years, the project went through dozens of iterations, proof-of-concept repos, rewrites, and experiments. Most of that work lives in private, archived repositories in the Gryt organization, around 30 repos in total. They're not gone, they're just not public.

The move to the current set of public repositories was already a consolidation effort. I merged scattered experiments into a clean monorepo structure. Squashing the history was a natural extension of that cleanup.

What this means for you

Nothing changes about how you use Gryt. The code is the same, and so are the features. The only differences are:

• The license is now AGPL-3.0, which gives the project and the community better protection.
• The git history starts fresh, with no license ambiguity.

If you have any questions about the license change, check out the licensing docs, or reach out on our Gryt server or Discord.