pacelore is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. Not MIT, not Apache 2.0, not AGPL. This was a deliberate choice, and it's worth explaining.

The problem with MIT for this project

The goal of pacelore is to give athletes the analytics that TrainingPeaks, Strava Summit, and Garmin Connect Premium charge for. The PMC, normalized power, peak power curves, GAP — these are not novel inventions, they're straightforward computations that got paywalled because the platforms that run the data have no incentive to make them free.

If pacelore were MIT-licensed, anyone could fork it, wrap it in a subscription, and charge $15/month for a lightly reskinned version. The athletes who the project is trying to help would end up paying again. The fork would compete with the original on marketing budget rather than on technical merit. This is the standard commercial-wrapper failure mode for developer tools.

MIT doesn't protect against this. AGPL technically requires source disclosure but doesn't block commercial use. GPL has the same gap.

What PolyForm Noncommercial allows

The PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license explicitly permits:

  • Personal use. Run it for yourself. No restrictions.
  • Self-hosting. Deploy pacelore on your own infrastructure for yourself, your family, your running club. No restrictions on the number of users as long as it's not a commercial offering.
  • Research and education. Academic use, teaching, research publications.
  • Nonprofit use. Running clubs, cycling federations, coaching nonprofits can host pacelore for their members.
  • Evaluation. Try it before any decision.

The one thing it blocks is commercial use — specifically, "use in connection with your business or another business, or for any income-generating purpose." If you want to offer pacelore as a paid service to customers, you need a commercial license.

The fork protection argument

The noncommercial clause is fork protection in practice. Anyone who wants to compete with the hosted pacelore.com using the pacelore codebase can only do so as a free service. They're welcome to. If someone self-hosts a better version and offers it for free to their community, that's exactly the kind of use the project is trying to enable.

What's blocked is the VC-funded fork that takes the free analytics, wraps them in a mobile app, and charges a subscription. That's the scenario that would harm the athletes the project is trying to serve.

Why not AGPL

AGPL (Affero GPL) requires that anyone who runs a modified version as a network service must publish their modifications under AGPL. This is stronger than GPL's source disclosure requirement but still permits commercial use. A company can run AGPL software commercially as long as they publish changes.

AGPL was designed for a different problem — preventing companies from running proprietary forks of GPL software without contributing back. It's a good license for that goal. It doesn't prevent commercialization, which is the goal here.

Why not source-available without a formal license

"Source is on GitHub but all rights reserved" is legally clear but practically hostile. It makes contributions impossible, scares away anyone who might want to self-host, and signals that the author doesn't want community involvement.

PolyForm Noncommercial was written specifically for this use case: projects that want permissive noncommercial sharing with a clear commercial boundary. It's a proper license with defined terms, not a bespoke restriction paragraph in a README. That matters for self-hosters who want legal certainty before deploying.

The source is at github.com/pablocaminog/pacelore. The license file is in the root. Read it — it's four pages, not forty.