# LICENSES

metergate itself is MIT (see [`../LICENSE`](../LICENSE)). This folder is a small
archive of the licenses you're most likely to actually reach for — kept here so
you don't go fishing across the internet the next time you start a project at 2am.

## In here, in full

- **MIT** — the default, the one everyone grabs first.
- **BSD-2-Clause**, **BSD-3-Clause** — MIT with extra paperwork.
- **ISC** — MIT after a diet.
- **0BSD** — like ISC, minus even the attribution requirement.
- **Unlicense** — for when you want to drop it into the public domain and walk away.
- **AGPL-3.0** — the strong-copyleft one with the network clause. §13 is the whole
  point: run a modified copy as a network service and you owe every user who
  interacts with it the corresponding source. It earns a spot here because
  metergate was written for a homeserver (continuwuity) that ships under exactly
  this license — so the text is load-bearing, not decorative. Canonical copy
  straight from gnu.org; not retyped from memory.
- **WTFPL** — *the awkward one.* It is a real, used-in-anger license whose entire
  operative clause is "You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO." Legally it mostly
  holds up; in a code review it will start a conversation. Use responsibly — or,
  per its own terms, don't.

## Not in here, on purpose

The other heavyweights — **Apache-2.0**, **MPL-2.0**, **LGPL-3.0**, **GPL-3.0** —
are each many kilobytes of load-bearing legalese where one transposed word
genuinely matters. Retyping those from memory is how you end up shipping a
license that says the opposite of what you meant. Grab the canonical text by
SPDX id instead:

| SPDX | canonical text |
|------|----------------|
| Apache-2.0 | https://spdx.org/licenses/Apache-2.0.html |
| MPL-2.0 | https://spdx.org/licenses/MPL-2.0.html |
| LGPL-3.0-or-later | https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-3.0-or-later.html |
| GPL-3.0-or-later | https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0-or-later.html |

Honorable mention to the *JSON License* ("The Software shall be used for Good,
not Evil"), which is so awkward that real companies have had to formally request
permission to use it for evil. We did not include it. We were tempted.