Self-hosted Feed Readers: what licence are you actually agreeing to

“Self-hosted” and “open source” are not the same promise, and the lists that recommend these projects rarely separate them. This page sorts 26 feed readers projects by the licence you are actually agreeing to, as read on 2026-08-20.

16 of 26 are permissive: run them, change them, keep your changes to yourself. 7 are AGPL, where serving a modified copy over a network obliges you to publish those changes, which is the clause that catches people who self-host for a team. 0 are not open source at all, carrying a proprietary or restricted-use licence. The remaining 3 are ordinary copyleft.

Project	Licence	What that means	Stars	Maintenance	Language
RSSHub	MIT	Permissive, no strings	45,817	Active	TypeScript
Miniflux	Apache-2.0	Permissive, no strings	9,597	Active	Go
RSS-Bridge	Unlicense	Permissive, no strings	9,181	Active	PHP
NewsBlur	MIT	Permissive, no strings	7,590	Active	Python
Stringer	MIT	Permissive, no strings	4,123	Active	Ruby
Yarr	MIT	Permissive, no strings	4,017	Active	Go
CommaFeed	Apache-2.0	Permissive, no strings	3,600	Active	Java
Fusion	MIT	Permissive, no strings	2,163	Active	TypeScript
reader	BSD-3-Clause	Permissive, no strings	551	Active	Python
Upvote RSS	MIT	Permissive, no strings	493	Active	PHP
RSS Monster	MIT	Permissive, no strings	483	Active	JavaScript
Feeds Fun	BSD-3-Clause	Permissive, no strings	389	Active	Python
TinyFeed	MIT	Permissive, no strings	373	Active	Go
Kriss Feed	CC0-1.0	Permissive, no strings	292	Active	PHP
Bubo Reader	MIT	Permissive, no strings	233	Slowing	TypeScript
Goeland	MIT	Permissive, no strings	202	Active	Go
Selfoss	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	2,469	Active	HTML
Tiny Tiny RSS	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	817	Active	PHP
RSS2EMail	GPL-2.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	455	Dormant	Python
Glance	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	36,466	Active	Go
FreshRSS	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	15,805	Active	PHP
bewCloud	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	1,219	Active	JavaScript
Readflow	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	476	Active	Go
Leed	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	234	Active	PHP
JARR	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	129	Active	Python
Newspipe	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	-	Not measured	Python

What the licence column means

Permissive (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC): do what you like, keep changes private.
Copyleft (GPL, LGPL, MPL, EPL): changes you distribute must ship their source.
AGPL, network copyleft: the same, and running it for others over a network counts as distribution. This is the one that surprises people who self-host for a team or a side business.
Source-available (SSPL, BUSL, Elastic, Commons Clause): not open source. Reading and self-use are usually fine; offering it as a service is not.
Other / unstated: the dataset lists no licence we could classify. Check the repo before you rely on it.

The Maintenance column is a second, independent check: the age of the most recent commit on the default branch, read from the GitHub API on 2026-08-20. Active is within 180 days, Slowing is 180 to 365, Dormant is over a year, Archived means the maintainer marked the repo read-only, and Not measured means the project is hosted outside GitHub so the check does not apply.

Source data from awesome-selfhosted-data, used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Licence family grouping and maintenance status are computed by this site (from the upstream licence fields and the GitHub API) and are not part of the upstream dataset. Licence classification is a summary, not legal advice: check the project’s own LICENSE file before you rely on it. This page is published under the same licence.