Licence rationale

Status: Accepted

Governance, not architecture — which is why this lives here rather than in an ADR. No component’s design depends on the licence choice.

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What we chose

Repo	Licence
lemonfiber	Hippocratic License 3.0
lemonfiber-media-stack	Hippocratic License 3.0
homebrew-tap	Hippocratic License 3.0
spec	CC BY-SA 4.0
brand — marks (assets/logo/*)	Proprietary, all rights reserved
brand — tokens + docs	Hippocratic 3.0 (tokens) / CC BY-SA 4.0 (docs)

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.

HL3 is modular — a core set of terms plus optional modules. Unless a module is explicitly adopted here, the project ships HL3-CORE.

Why

The project’s values are the reason. 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 this costs — read this before depending on it

The Hippocratic License is not OSI-approved and is not recognised as open source by the OSI, nor as free software by the FSF. This is not an oversight or a pending application: HL3 restricts fields of endeavour, which OSD clause 6 forbids by design. The ethical-source movement’s position is that the OSD is wrong on this point — a coherent stance, but it means the “open source” label does not apply.

Practical consequences, stated plainly:

Area	Consequence
GitHub	Sidebar shows “Other”. No recognised licence badge.
crates.io	HL3 is not an SPDX identifier. Cargo.toml must use license-file = "LICENSE.md" instead of license = "…". Publishing still works.
Distro packaging	Debian, Fedora, nixpkgs and similar will not accept it into their repositories.
homebrew-core	Requires OSI-approved licences. Our own tap is unaffected — this is why homebrew-tap exists and is not a limitation in practice.
Corporate use	Many legal teams auto-reject non-OSI licences. Given this is a self-hosted household tool, that’s not a target audience.
Contributors	Some will decline to contribute to non-OSI-licensed projects.
Enforceability	Largely untested in court. Its practical force is normative rather than legal.

None of these block the project. All of them are worth knowing before someone builds on it.

What we didn’t choose

Option	Why not
AGPL-3.0-or-later	The strongest OSI-approved approximation of the same instinct: it can’t restrict who uses the software or for what, but it closes the SaaS loophole, so hosted derivatives must publish source. Rejected because the goal here is to state an ethical position directly, not to approximate it through reciprocity. Remains the obvious fallback if OSI approval ever becomes necessary.
GPL-3.0	Conventional fit for a desktop application, but weaker reciprocity than AGPL and no ethical clause — loses on both axes.
MIT / Apache-2.0	Rust ecosystem default and best for adoption. Permits exactly the unrestricted commercial use the Hippocratic choice objects to.
SSPL / BUSL / Commons Clause	Also non-OSI, but motivated by commercial moats rather than ethics. Worst of both worlds.

The brand marks are proprietary — deliberately

The one component that is not open in any form is the logo and marks (brand/assets/logo/*). This is not a contradiction of the project’s values; it is the standard pattern for open projects with a protected identity.

Rust, Mozilla, Python and Docker all do this: the software is open, the trademark is not. 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. Trademark protection is what keeps “lemonfiber” meaning this project.

So within brand:

• Marks (assets/logo/*) — proprietary, all rights reserved. Use requires permission.
• Tokens (tokens/*) — Hippocratic 3.0, because the web UI embeds them and they must be freely usable by anyone building on or forking the code.
• Docs (docs/*) — CC BY-SA 4.0, like the rest of the documentation.

The README states the split at the top so no one mistakes a proprietary mark for a freely reusable asset. This keeps the “no proprietary components” claim honest: the software carries none — the tokens it embeds are open — while the identity is protected, which is a trademark matter, not a software-freedom one.

Note on bundled services

Every service the stack orchestrates is OSI-licensed open source. The authoritative per-service licence is the license field on each [[service]] in stack.toml, which is what the manifest contract validates; this table groups all nineteen of them using the same SPDX identifiers.

Licence	Services
GPL-3.0-only	Prowlarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Bazarr, Calibre-Web-Automated, Audiobookshelf, Homepage
GPL-2.0-only	Jellyfin, SABnzbd, qBittorrent
MIT	Bindery, Seerr, Gluetun, FlareSolverr, Recyclarr, Unpackerr
Apache-2.0	NZBHydra2, Caddy

Our licence choice has no effect on theirs, and theirs has none on ours. lemonfiber-media-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.

Documentation licence

spec uses CC BY-SA 4.0. Creative Commons licences are unsuitable for software — 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.

Revisiting

Reasons that would justify reopening this:

• Distribution via distro packaging becomes important.
• Contributor friction from the licence becomes measurable.
• The OSI position on ethical-source licensing changes.

If reopened, AGPL-3.0-or-later is the leading alternative.