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lemonfiber

The licence

lemonfiber is not licensed the way most software you install is. Read this before you build on it, because the difference is real and some of it will matter to you.

What is licensed how

Section titled “What is licensed how”
What Licence
The binary, the stack, the tap, the SDKs, the web surface, the sites Hippocratic License 3.0
The specification and the documentation CC BY-SA 4.0
The design tokens in brand Hippocratic License 3.0
The logo and marks in brand Proprietary, all rights reserved

The Hippocratic License is an ethical source licence from the Organization for Ethical Source. It grants broad permissions while prohibiting uses that violate human rights standards. It is modular; the project ships the core terms unless a module is explicitly adopted.

Why

Section titled “Why”

The project’s values are the reason, and there is not a more sophisticated one. This is software for individuals running things on their own hardware, and the licence is meant to state a position rather than maximise adoption. Restricting harmful use is the point, not a side effect.

What it costs

Section titled “What it costs”

The Hippocratic License is not OSI-approved and is not recognised as open source by the OSI, nor as free software by the FSF. That is not an oversight or a pending application: the licence restricts fields of endeavour, which the Open Source Definition forbids by design. The ethical-source position is that the definition is wrong on this point — a coherent argument, but it means the “open source” label does not apply here.

Stated plainly, so nobody discovers it later:

Area Consequence
GitHub The sidebar shows “Other”. There is no recognised licence badge.
crates.io There is no SPDX identifier, so the manifest points at the licence file instead. Publishing still works.
Distribution packaging Debian, Fedora, nixpkgs and similar will not accept it into their repositories.
homebrew-core Requires OSI-approved licences. The project’s own tap is unaffected, which is why the tap exists.
Corporate use Many legal teams reject non-OSI licences automatically. For a self-hosted household tool, that is not the audience.
Contributors Some people will decline to contribute to a non-OSI-licensed project.
Enforceability Largely untested in court. Its force is normative rather than legal.

None of these block the project. All of them are worth knowing before you depend on it.

What was not chosen

Section titled “What was not chosen”

AGPL-3.0-or-later is the strongest OSI-approved approximation of the same instinct — it cannot restrict who uses the software or for what, but it closes the hosted-service loophole. It was rejected because the goal is to state an ethical position directly rather than approximate it through reciprocity, and it remains the obvious fallback if OSI approval ever becomes necessary.

GPL-3.0 is a conventional fit for a desktop application but has weaker reciprocity than AGPL and no ethical clause, so it loses on both axes. MIT and Apache-2.0 are the Rust ecosystem’s defaults and the best choice for adoption, and they permit exactly the unrestricted commercial use this choice objects to. SSPL, BUSL and Commons Clause are also non-OSI, but motivated by commercial moats rather than ethics — the worst of both.

The marks are deliberately not open

Section titled “The marks are deliberately not open”

The logo and wordmark are the one component that is not open in any form. This is not a contradiction of the project’s values; it is the standard arrangement for an open project with a protected identity, and Rust, Mozilla, Python and Docker all do the same. Anyone may use, fork and redistribute the code; nobody may ship their fork under the original name and logo, because that would let a fork impersonate the project.

That is also why brand is licensed in two parts. The tokens are open, so a fork — or the web UI — can use the visual system. The marks stay proprietary, so the identity cannot be lifted with it.

If you fork: rename it, bring your own logo, keep the licences and the attribution, and say “based on lemonfiber” as a matter of fact. Referring to lemonfiber by name needs no permission; using the name or mark as your own project’s identity does. The policy is trademark and forking.

Contributions

Section titled “Contributions”

Your contribution is licensed under the same licence as the repository it lands in. There is no contributor licence agreement and no copyright assignment: you keep your copyright, and you licence the work inbound on the terms the project ships outbound. See sign-off and licensing.

The services lemonfiber runs are not affected

Section titled “The services lemonfiber runs are not affected”

Every service the stack orchestrates is OSI-licensed open source, and the authoritative licence for each one is recorded against it in the stack manifest. The stack distributes configuration that references public container images; it does not link against, embed or redistribute their code. No copyleft obligation propagates in either direction — this licence choice has no effect on theirs, and theirs has none on this one.

Why the documentation is licensed separately

Section titled “Why the documentation is licensed separately”

Creative Commons licences are unsuitable for software, and Creative Commons say so themselves. But CC BY-SA is the right tool for prose, and its ShareAlike clause is consistent with the reciprocity instinct behind the code licence.

Section titled “Related”