Licensing rules shape the future of your stack
Licensing rules shape the future of your stack. Open Policy Agent (OPA) runs at the center of that reality. If you use OPA to enforce policies, understanding its licensing model is not optional—it’s critical for scaling securely and avoiding legal friction.
OPA is open source, licensed under the Apache License 2.0. This gives you wide freedom to use, modify, and distribute the code without fees. You can embed OPA in your services, deploy it in production, and integrate it with pipelines without negotiating extra terms. The license is permissive: no copyleft clauses, no hidden restrictions. You keep control of your code.
The Apache 2.0 license requires that you include the license text, provide attribution, and note any changes you make. It also provides an explicit patent grant. That means contributors cannot later claim patent infringement for the covered code. This is important if you operate at scale or in regulated environments.
OPA’s licensing model makes it simple to align policy enforcement across APIs, Kubernetes, and microservices. Because it is purely open source with a permissive license, you can run OPA from development to production without switching to a paid tier or dealing with license audits. This transparency fuels adoption among large organizations building compliance infrastructure.
However, you must still treat licensing compliance as part of your deployment checklist. Use automated scanning to ensure every OPA build you ship contains the correct license and attribution. Keep policy bundles clean of third-party code that may introduce other licenses. In modern CI/CD flows, ignoring this step can cause security and legal issues later.
The Open Policy Agent licensing model is one of its strongest advantages. It’s built for open integration, fast collaboration, and large-scale automation. No closed modules, no proprietary hooks—just Apache 2.0 and the freedom it guarantees.
See how this plays out with real policies running in minutes at hoop.dev.