is it really FOSS?

Defguard

A wireguard-based VPN

Issues exist
There's some FOSS code here, but there are licensing, marketing or transparency issues.

Details

The project is provided under a AGPLv3 mixed with an non-FOSS enterprise license for some portions of the code which limits use, modification & distribution.

From a search, the project appears to rely on the non-FOSS code from their AGPLv3 codebase.

The mixing and reliance of non-FOSS code was queried on Reddit, with a project author eventually (after several rounds of messages) stating:

[…] for our ease of development - and the fact that Enterprise license/offering is a way to support the development and the status-quo of the project we do not provide “pure” AGPL code - as that would require our overhead to prepare some mechanism in order to prepare a pure AGPL builds/code and then a second version with Enterprise.

along with:

Our current priority is to build the most useful and most secure security system — unfortunately, this requires a compromise between open source and enterprise.

The project advertises as open source on their project homepage, their blog and in their marketing.

No contributor relicensing rights handover (via CLA for example) could be found during review, despite the license setup.

The project appears to be developed by the company Teonite. The project appears to have raised €1.2m in funding from investors which include Hard2beat, Maurycy Prodeus, Janusz Niewiadomski, SMOK Ventures, S20 Team, Łukasz Jesis, Piotr Karwatka and Tomasz Karwatka. They also appear to gain revenue from selling their software at various tiers and from support offerings.

Details last reviewed 2025-06-17. Our reviews are performed manually, without legal expertise, and therefore may be inaccurate or missing detail relevant for your use. Please don't treat this as legal guidance or assurance of any kind.

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