Licence and price
What it costs
Section titled “What it costs”Nothing.
And the reason is not a promise, it is the licence. LO-TEK is released under MIT, and every version that has been released stays MIT. That permission is irrevocable. It cannot be withdrawn by anyone, not even by me, and it also applies if the project is one day put on hold.
So you do not need to trust that I mean well. You can read the licence file.
What you are allowed to do
Section titled “What you are allowed to do”All the usual things, without asking:
- use LO-TEK commercially, in as many projects as you like
- change it, and keep the changes to yourself
- ship it in a product you sell, including a closed one
- publish your own version of it
The only condition is that the copyright notice and the licence text are included in copies of
the software. They are in node_modules, so in practice this happens by itself.
You owe me no credit beyond that, no link back, and no notice that you use it.
What is not promised
Section titled “What is not promised”MIT disclaims all warranty, and that is not a formality here.
In concrete terms:
- no guarantee that anything works
- no obligation for me to reply, fix bugs or release new versions
- no timeline, and no promise of backwards compatibility beyond what the version contract says
If you are considering LO-TEK for something that must work in five years, read that section once more. The licence makes the code yours forever, but it does not make me your supplier.
The name is not included
Section titled “The name is not included”MIT gives away the code. It does not give away the name.
LO-TEK and the logo are not part of the permission. You can fork the code and do what you like with it, but you cannot call the result LO-TEK, publish a package under that name, or give the impression that it comes from here.
That is the usual arrangement in open source, and it exists as much for your sake as for mine: the name meaning one specific thing is what makes it possible to say what you have actually adopted.
Contributing
Section titled “Contributing”Issues are always welcome. A bug report, a question or an idea costs you nothing to send and me nothing to read.
Pull requests are accepted after a conversation first. Say in an issue what you want to do, before you write the code. That is not a barrier, it is a courtesy: LO-TEK has six checks that enforce things that are not obvious from the outside, and I would rather say so before you have spent an evening than after.
Contributors sign the contributor licence agreement. You keep the copyright to what you write. The agreement gives me the right to license the contribution on other terms later, so that one contribution does not lock the project’s future. Everything already published under MIT stays MIT whatever happens.
Forking
Section titled “Forking”Feel free to fork.
If you need something LO-TEK does not do, disagree with a decision, or want to take it somewhere I am not going to take it: take your copy and go. It needs no permission and no justification.
That you can carry on without me is not a weakness of the project. It is the whole point of giving it away under MIT. The only thing I ask is that what you make gets its own name.