gradle/DISTRIBUTION.md

Distribution and Licensing of gradle/actions

This document provides a clear breakdown of the components within the gradle/actions repository, their respective licenses, and how we handle data and privacy. Our goal is to provide the best possible experience for running Gradle on GitHub Actions while maintaining our commitment to the open-source community.

1. Component Map

The gradle/actions project consists of three primary components:

Component	License	Source	Description
Action Runner	MIT	Open	The core action logic: configures a local Gradle installation, performs wrapper validation, and reports on Gradle build execution.
Basic Caching	MIT	Open	Configures basic Gradle User Home caching using 'actions/cache'.
Enhanced Caching	Proprietary	Closed	Uses the 'gradle-actions-caching' library to provide fine-grained caching of Gradle User Home, intelligent cache cleanup and other advanced features.

By default, Enhanced Caching is enabled to provide the best experience.

2. The "Safe Harbor" Clause (Data Privacy)

The proprietary components of this action are governed by the Gradle Technologies Terms of Use. We have updated these terms to include a specific safe harbor for users of gradle-actions-caching.

Plain English Summary: Gradle does not claim ownership of any code, build artifacts, or other content processed by the caching library. These remain your sole property. We only use metadata (like cache keys) to facilitate the caching service.

3. Usage Tiers

To support the development of high-performance CI tooling, we offer the following usage model:

• Public Repositories:
  • Both Basic and Enhanced caching are free forever. We are committed to supporting the open-source ecosystem at no cost.
• Private Repositories:
  • Basic Caching is free forever under the MIT license.
  • Enhanced Caching is currently in a Free Preview phase. We plan to introduce usage-based pricing for large-scale commercial organizations in the future.

While we haven't finalized specific usage thresholds yet, our intent is to keep Enhanced Caching free for individual developers and small teams. We are currently in a learning phase to ensure that future restrictions are focused on large-scale commercial users of the product. No matter how these limits evolve, the open-source Basic Caching provider will always remain a free, functional alternative for everyone.

4. Your Choice: Basic vs. Enhanced

We believe in user autonomy. If you do not wish to use proprietary code or accept the Gradle Technologies Terms of Use, you can opt-out of enhanced caching with a single line of configuration:

- uses: gradle/actions/setup-gradle@v6
  with:
    cache-provider: basic # Switches to the MIT-licensed open-source implementation

Important

Licensing notice

The software in this repository, except for the bundled gradle-actions-caching component, is licensed under the MIT License.

The caching functionality in this project has been extracted into gradle-actions-caching, a proprietary commercial component that is not covered by the MIT License for this repository.

Use of the gradle-actions-caching component is subject to a separate license, available at https://gradle.com/legal/terms-of-use/.

The gradle-actions-caching component is used only when enhanced caching is enabled and is not loaded or used with basic caching or when caching is disabled.