The story of this AI cycle isn't "the frontier got smarter." It's "the frontier got closed" — the best models gate to vetted partners, public tiers silently reroute your sensitive traffic, and whole stacks sit one revoked key from dark. Bike4Mind is the open hedge: own the orchestration layer, make the model a swappable commodity, and run open-weight on your own iron.

We open-sourced our core on July 5, 2026, under a license we can't quietly take back:

BSL 1.1 today → Apache-2.0 on a two-year clock, written into the license text. Automatic. Per release. Irrevocable. A ratchet, not a promise — Bike4Mind only ever gets more open.

Read it, run it, self-host the whole thing, and build and sell your own products on it. The only carve-out is standing up a competing hosted Bike4Mind service. Source-available is not OSI open source, and we won't pretend otherwise — here's the full license walk-through, dead ends and all.

• Notebooks — chat, documents, and context in one workspace, across any model
• Any model, one interface — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, Bedrock, or local via Ollama/vLLM (Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek). Swap mid-conversation.
• Agents & Quests — autonomous, multi-step, budget-guarded task runs with human-in-the-loop
• Knowledge Engine — RAG over your files: chunking, vector search, collections
• Artifacts — live React/Python artifacts, versioned and publishable
• B4M CLI + MCP — secure websocket tunnel to your Claude Code or our CLI; MCP host + first-party servers
• Enterprise batteries — multi-tenant, RBAC, MFA, moderation, analytics, credits — even a slim CRM

One docker compose brings up the whole stack with local models — no AWS, no API key, fully offline if you want. Our own team iterates faster on the local stack than on the cloud dev flow.

docker compose -f compose.selfhost.yaml --env-file .env.selfhost up -d

→ Self-Host Quickstart · image at ghcr.io/bike4mind/bike4mind-selfhost

Bootstrapped, profitable, zero outside capital. The same engine already runs BedrockNews, StocksandVibes, and K2Kanji in production. Your deployment won't be the first thing built on this engine — it'll be the fifth.

📦 Source → · 🌱 The story → · 📜 Why this license → · ✍️ Blog → · 💬 r/Bike4Mind → · 🚀 Try it →