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Boardroom Answers · Security & Compliance · Compliance, Regulatory & Legal

Your product sits on a mountain of open-source. Can you give me a bill of materials, and can you tell me there's no copyleft license in your stack that could contaminate your proprietary code — or, by extension, complicate our vendor diligence?

The question a General Counsel / Chief Legal Officer (CLO) asks.

The short answer

A CycloneDX SBOM with license metadata is generated and attested on every build — your team audits ground truth, not our summary. Stack is mainstream permissive-license npm, we're server-side SaaS so classic GPL mechanics don't attach, and the honest gap is an automated CI license gate, planned this year.

The full executive answer

Yes to the bill of materials, with receipts: every CI build generates a CycloneDX SBOM — the industry-standard machine-readable inventory of every package and version in the product — retained as a build artifact with cryptographic provenance attestation, so what we hand your diligence team is generated from the actual shipped build, not a manually maintained list that drifted. That SBOM includes license metadata per component, which means your team — or an M&A acquirer's, which I suspect is the experience behind the question — can run their own license analysis against ground truth rather than our summary.

On copyleft: our own code is proprietary (the package manifest is explicitly marked as unlicensed/all-rights-reserved), and the dependency stack is the mainstream commercial JavaScript ecosystem — Next.js, React, the Supabase and payment SDKs, the AI provider SDKs — which lives almost universally under permissive licenses (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC) precisely because that ecosystem is built for commercial embedding. Two precision points a good review will appreciate: first, we're a server-side SaaS, which means even weak-copyleft components would generally not trigger distribution-based obligations — the classic GPL "contamination" mechanics attach to distributing software, which SaaS doesn't do (that's the AGPL's reason for existing, and AGPL components are what a SaaS review actually hunts for); second, the honest gap — we do not yet run an automated license-policy gate in CI that would block a future developer or transitive dependency from introducing a copyleft package. Today that's covered by the SBOM's auditability and the ecosystem's norms; a blocking license-allowlist check is a small, planned addition to the Security workflow alongside this year's SOC 2 readiness work.

So the diligence offer is concrete: current SBOM with license fields this week, refresh at any milestone you choose, and — if your team finds anything questionable in the transitive tree — we treat it as a P1 to replace, which in the npm ecosystem is typically a same-week swap. For your own vendor-diligence file, that's a cleaner position than most mature vendors, whose SBOMs are annual archaeology rather than per-build artifacts.

Grounded in: SLSA v1.0 (SBOM + provenance); NTIA SBOM minimum elements; SPDX/CycloneDX license metadata standards; ISO 27001 A.8.30 (outsourced development context).

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