Question on licensing

[kubre]

I was checking out this project to self-host. I saw the license is Ev2 and found the lines rather vague: "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service."

Explaining my use case I have an option where people can upload their data sets and ask questions on it (Basic RAG/ Agent). Now to provide confidence in the system when users make changes to their agents, like prompting or adding more data they need to ensure they don't regress in quality. So, I was thinking I could use Phoenix APIs to provide a simple test check where if someone modifies something in their agent I would run evaluations on Phoenix and store results in our DB and show it on different frontend.

With the above use case, I'm not hosting Phoenix as a separate evaluation service to be sold itself or anything like that rather just using it as an evaluation framework due to how easily it works with langchain. But considering the license I'm not sure.

I was wondering if the commercial product above the use case would classify as a managed service to third parties. Considering I'm not providing evaluations as a standalone service but as part of the overall product.

[dosubot[bot]]

🤖

Hey @kubre, great to see you diving into another aspect of Arize Phoenix! How's everything going on your end?

Based on the information you've provided and the context from the Arize Phoenix repository, it seems like your use case might be in a gray area of the Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2). The license states that "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service", but it's not entirely clear if your use case would fall under this restriction.

In your case, you're not directly providing Arize Phoenix as a service, but rather using it as a part of your own service. However, the results generated by Arize Phoenix are being stored and shown to your users, which could potentially be seen as providing it as a managed service.

Unfortunately, as a technical support rep, I'm not qualified to provide legal advice on license interpretation. I would recommend consulting with a legal professional who is familiar with software licensing to get a definitive answer. They would be able to provide you with advice based on the exact wording of the license and the specifics of your use case.

I hope this helps, and I'm sorry I couldn't provide a more definitive answer. If you have any other technical questions about Arize Phoenix, feel free to ask.

Sources

• packages/phoenix-evals/IP_NOTICE

About Dosu

This response is meant to be useful and save you time. It is not meant to be a precise solution, but rather a starting point for your own research.

Help me be more useful! Please leave a 👍 if this is helpful and 👎 if it is irrelevant.

If you want to continue the conversation, start your reply with @dosu-bot.

[jlopatec]

@kubre That is not a problem, no worries, feel free to use.