Licence and ownership

CoreCP is proprietary software. This page explains what the panel says about ownership, where the licence text lives, and — the question that comes up most — what you tell a hosting customer who asks about it.

What the panel shows

Go to Settings → General. Under the platform name and the panel version there is one line: the copyright, naming the company that owns the software and the year, followed by All rights reserved. Next to it is a Read the licence button. It opens two documents, one under the other:

• Licence — the terms themselves: whose the software is, who may use it, and that downloading or installing it grants no right by itself.
• Third-party components — every component of somebody else's that ships with CoreCP, each keeping its own licence: the Go modules inside the programs, the npm packages behind the web interface, and the typeface the panel sends to every browser. Above the list is how many there are; below it, every licence in full. What keeps that list complete, and how to read back what an installed version is made of, is in Where a release comes from.

Both texts are shown in full, exactly as they are in the source. Nothing is summarised: a licence you can only read in summary is not one you can check.

Where else the text lives

On every server running CoreCP, at the path Debian keeps licences at:

# on a node
cat /usr/share/doc/corecp-agent/copyright

# on a panel server installed from a package
cat /usr/share/doc/corecp-panel/copyright

One file, with the licence on top and the third-party components below it. That is deliberate: Ubuntu drops everything under /usr/share/doc except copyright at unpack time, so a second file beside it never reaches the server.

dpkg -L corecp-agent lists the same file. Its content comes from LICENSE and NOTICE in the source, so the three places cannot drift apart.

What you tell a customer

A hosting customer needs no licence to CoreCP, and is not given one. They buy a service from your company; what they may expect is in that company's terms, not in the panel's licence. The licence text says as much itself, so a customer who comes across the file does not conclude they have an agreement with a party they have never heard of.

That is also why the copyright line appears nowhere a customer goes: not in a footer, not in the collapsed sidebar, on no customer screen at all. The panel carries your brand, and it stays yours. For the same reason this article does not spell out the rightsholder's name: the knowledge base is also readable on the public documentation site. You read the name on your own screen.

Who may run the panel

Use is limited to the rightsholder — the party named in the copyright line — and to companies it has authorised in writing, for providing their own hosting services. Another company working with it is an agreement on paper — not something arranged by installing the package.

If the licence changes

The text is a template rather than legal advice, and it is to be read by a lawyer before the first external participant. If it is amended, that happens in LICENSE in the source. The panel and both packages follow at the next build — there is no second copy to maintain, and the build refuses if one falls behind.