# Licence: not yet chosen

Blocker has **no licence yet**. This is deliberate, and it is recorded as ADR-17
rather than left as an oversight.

## Why nothing was applied

Applying a licence is a legal commitment, and it is the owner's to make. CLAUDE.md
section 0 rule 3 requires stopping to ask before decisions of that kind — and the
temptation to "just pick MIT" is exactly the kind of well-meant overreach that rule
exists to prevent.

There is a second reason specific to this project, and it is not a formality.

**The licence choice and the UI toolkit choice interact.** ADR-6 leaves the desktop
toolkit undecided between Slint and egui. Slint is GPL-3.0 or commercial; egui is
MIT or Apache-2.0. Choosing a permissive licence and then Slint would force the
project GPL, and discovering that after building against Slint would mean either
relicensing under copyleft or paying for a commercial licence — so the licence is
genuinely upstream of the toolkit decision, not beside it.

Until both are settled, the project stays unlicensed and unpublished.

## What this means in practice

- The code is not yet published anywhere. The repository is on a self-hosted Gitea.
- Nothing here is released, distributed, or offered to third parties.
- No licence header is asserted in any source file, because asserting one would be
  asserting something untrue.

## What is needed to resolve this

1. **A licence choice.** The realistic candidates for a project intended to be
   published: MIT, Apache-2.0, AGPL-3.0, or a dual licence.
2. **The UI toolkit decision** (ADR-6), which follows from it — or is decided on
   measurement first, with the licence chosen to accommodate it.

## If you want to publish before this is settled

Don't. An unlicensed repository is, by default, not open source and not usable by
anyone else, and publishing it that way is a mess to unpick.

If you are in a hurry, the fastest honest path is: pick MIT or Apache-2.0 (both
permissive, both compatible with egui), then decide the toolkit with the licence
constraint known. That is a suggestion, not a decision — it is the owner's call.

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*Recorded in `docs/DECISIONS.md` as ADR-17. Remove this file when a licence is
chosen, and add `LICENSE` with the actual terms.*