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Licensing

This repository is MIT-licensed by default. The full text is in LICENSE, and it applies to everything in the repository except a directory that ships its own LICENSE file, which governs that directory instead.

This file travels with the code: it is packaged (alongside TRADEMARKS.md) into every wheel's dist-info/licenses/ directory. Paths in this document are repository paths. A distribution will not contain most of them, because pro/ and the docs/ website tree are pruned from everything published (see MANIFEST.in); the paths still identify exactly which files each statement is about, and all of them can be inspected at https://github.com/ptweezy/cronstable.

Why this file exists

cronstable is planned to grow.

The rule

  1. The root LICENSE (MIT) governs the whole repository by default.
  2. A directory that contains its own LICENSE file is governed only by that license, for that directory and everything under it.
  3. For any file, the nearest LICENSE found walking up the directory tree wins. If none is found before the root, the root MIT LICENSE applies.

Current layout

Path License Notes
/ core (cronstable/, docs, tests, CI, packaging, ...) MIT See LICENSE.
pro/ Proprietary cronstable Pro (the cronstable-pro package). See pro/LICENSE. Not open source.
rendered brand artwork under docs/ Reserved The finished logo and social card. See Brand assets below.

As more proprietary components are added, each gets its own LICENSE file under the same rule, and a row here. Proprietary directories are pruned from the public MIT sdist (see MANIFEST.in), so they are never distributed through PyPI.

Brand assets

One narrow set of files is excluded from the MIT grant: the rendered brand artwork. These sit in directories that are otherwise MIT (they share docs/img/ with dozens of ordinary screenshots), so a directory-level LICENSE file would claim too much. They are listed by name instead, in three places that a reader can reach from wherever they start:

  • LICENSE names the exclusion, so the operative grant is not silent about its own scope.
  • this section holds the authoritative list.
  • docs/img/README.md repeats it next to the files.

The list:

Pattern What it is
docs/**/logo-balance.gif, docs/**/logo-balance.webp the animated wordmark, dark
docs/**/logo-balance-light.gif, docs/**/logo-balance-light.webp the animated wordmark, light
docs/**/social-preview.png the repository social card

These are the finished logo, not source. They may be reproduced unmodified when referring to cronstable itself, which is the same latitude the nominative fair use section of TRADEMARKS.md gives the name: write about the project, link to it, illustrate a post about it. Every other right, including the right to modify them or to adopt them as the identity of another product, is reserved by Parker Loflin.

Two things this deliberately does not do:

  • It does not touch the logo engine. The cart-and-double-pendulum simulation that draws the wordmark lives in cronstable/web/index.html and docs/logo-lab.html. Both are ordinary product source and stay MIT, so a fork keeps a working dashboard and is free to run, study, and modify the physics. What a fork may not do is keep calling the result cronstable, and that is a trademark question rather than a copyright one.
  • It is not retroactive. Anyone who already received these files under the MIT License keeps that grant for the copies they received. The reservation applies going forward, which is the most any license change can do.

Keeping the boundary clean

  • Proprietary code may import the MIT core; MIT permits proprietary software to build on it.

  • Do not copy MIT-licensed source into a proprietary directory. Importing the core is fine; vendoring its source there would pull MIT-covered code (and its attribution obligation) into a proprietary tree. Keep the boundary at the import level.

  • New files in a proprietary directory carry an SPDX header so the license is unambiguous even out of context:

    # SPDX-License-Identifier: LicenseRef-cronstable-Proprietary

    Core files rely on the root LICENSE and need no header; they may optionally carry # SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT.

Third-party code and dependencies

cronstable is a fork of yacron (MIT); the root LICENSE preserves yacron's copyright alongside cronstable's, as MIT requires.

Runtime dependencies of the core install are permissive (MIT / BSD / Apache / PSF / MPL). A CI guard (.github/scripts/check_licenses.py, run by the licenses job over the runtime plus every distributable extra) fails the build if a strong-copyleft (GPL / AGPL) or non-open source-available (SSPL / BUSL) dependency is ever introduced, so the permissive baseline cannot regress by accident. This matters because the shipped artifacts (the PyInstaller binaries and Docker images) bundle the whole dependency tree.

One dependency is weak copyleft, bundled deliberately and with its obligations met explicitly:

  • python-zeroconf (the discovery extra, behind web.bonjour) is LGPL-2.1-or-later and is included, unmodified, in the standalone binaries, the Docker images, and the discovery pip extra. The LGPL permits proprietary-or-MIT applications to bundle the library; in exchange the recipient must get the license text, access to the library's source, and a real way to use a modified build of the library. cronstable meets each one:

    • Notice + license text: every artifact carries cronstable/licenses/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt (the notice plus the full LGPL-2.1 text) as package data; any binary prints it with cronstable --third-party-licenses. Docker and pip installs additionally keep zeroconf's own COPYING in its dist-info.
    • Source access: each GitHub Release attaches the python-zeroconf source archive next to the binaries; it is also on PyPI and GitHub.
    • Relink right: cronstable is fully open source, and the binaries are produced by a public recipe (pyinstaller/cronstable.spec plus the binaries* jobs in .github/workflows/release.yml). To run the combined work with a modified python-zeroconf, install cronstable from PyPI beside your build of the library (pip installs keep it as ordinary replaceable files), or rebuild the binary from this repository with your modified library in the build environment. Nothing in the MIT license restricts modification or the reverse engineering needed to debug such modifications.

    The licenses CI job reports zeroconf as weak copyleft (allowed) on every run, keeping the choice visible; a strong-copyleft dependency would still fail the gate.

Trademarks

The MIT License covers the code, not the brand. The cronstable name and logo are trademarks; see TRADEMARKS.md.