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Sustainable Open Source

Zensical is built on a simple idea: the tools required to build and publish documentation should remain Open Source, portable, and independently useful.

Studio and Spark add optional commercial value around that foundation. Studio makes authoring safer and faster; Spark provides early access, support, and continuity. Neither is required to build, publish, host, or maintain a Zensical project.

Freedom and portability

Zensical and every project we release as Open Source use the permissive MIT license. You can write in any editor, choose your own publishing workflow, host your site anywhere, and use Zensical for commercial projects.

Your documentation remains plain files in open formats. Studio can improve how you work with those files, but it never becomes a dependency of the site you publish. If your needs change, your content and workflow remain yours.

Continuity and independence

Revenue from Studio and Spark allows us to invest in Zensical, maintain the Open Source foundation, and support a team of professionals working on it for the long term.

Before choosing this model, we considered several alternatives:

  1. Sponsorship funded our Open Source work for years and taught us a great deal, but it did not provide the predictability needed to sustain a professional team working on Zensical full-time.
  2. Venture funding could accelerate growth, but would make our independence and priorities partly dependent on outside interests.
  3. Copyleft licensing can protect Open Source software, but often adds legal and adoption friction for organizations.

Instead, Zensical uses an MIT-licensed Open Source foundation with optional commercial products and services around it. This gives users broad freedom while providing the resources required for continued development.

Accountability

Because your projects remain portable and independently usable, we must continue earning your trust through the quality, compatibility, and reliability of our work. We have held ourselves to that standard across our Open Source projects for more than a decade.

It's how we work.