Toby

From the Software License:

3. Free Trial: Any person may use the Software in an environment that is purely for the purposes of development and client preview, and only accessible by a restricted number of users (like on a personal computer, on a server in a network with restricted access, or when protecting a staging website with a password that only a restricted number of users know).

In other words, trialling Waterhole in a staging environment (whether it's local or not) is permitted Note that the license validator will yell at you because it can't tell between staging vs production, but otherwise the software will function nominally.

I can answer this, since I did the implementation. Currently authentication for the forum is exclusively via Google OAuth, the same as authentication for the Tana app. It's on the roadmap to work on a tighter auth integration though (as well as making Waterhole generally more capable in this regard).