Apache License 2.0

What this means in plain English

Apache-2.0 is a permissive licence. It is the same licence used by Kubernetes, Android, and most of the modern cloud-native stack. You are free to use, modify, and redistribute the software — including for commercial purposes — without paying anything or asking permission.

You may

• Use the software privately or commercially, in unlimited projects and by unlimited users.
• Modify the source and keep your changes private.
• Redistribute the software, modified or unmodified, including as part of a larger product.
• Sublicense it, and combine it with differently licensed code.

You must

• Keep the copyright notice, the licence text, and any NOTICE file with any redistribution.
• Include a copy of the licence if you redistribute the software.
• State clearly, in any modified file, that you changed it.

What you may not do

• Use the project's names or logos to imply endorsement of your product. See Press & Brand for the name-usage guidelines.
• Hold the authors liable. The software is provided as is, without warranty of any kind — the licence says so in its capital-letter disclaimer.

Why Apache-2.0

We chose Apache-2.0 over MIT for two reasons. First, it carries an explicit patent grant, so contributors and users cannot be ambushed by a patent claim over code they were encouraged to use. Second, it requires changes to be marked, which keeps provenance honest in a project maintained by a community rather than a company. It is deliberately permissive: if you build a business on this software, you keep what you build.

Model weights and documentation

The licence above covers the source code in this repository. Model weights published to Hugging Face carry the licence stated on each model card; where that differs, the model card governs for that artefact. The prose on this website is licensed CC BY 4.0.

Questions

Licence questions can be raised in the project's discussions: GitHub Discussions.