Licensing FAQs

At Project Elara, our work is fully open-source and will always be publicly-accessible. In addition, a large proportion of our work is dedicated to the public domain, meaning it is forever given away to the world at no cost. However, our licensing can be a bit confusing to understand, so here is a clarification of some common questions about our licensing.

What's the point of public domain licensing?

We want our work to benefit as many people as possible, and for us, that means removing all barriers for others to use and share our work. In addition, we wanted to make sure that our work could never be paywalled or restricted, and very importantly, that it would never be patented at a hefty fee or sold off to anyone. A public domain license safeguards our work by essentially saying that we relinquish any and all ownership and copyright over our work, so it belongs to the general public and is no longer patentable, nor can be copyrighted, by anyone. It protects our work from being commodified and ensures it is always publicly available.

Note: Project Elara does have certain repositories that aren’t public domain, though still licensed under open-source licenses, such as the MIT License and the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 International License. For a list of non-public-domain repositories, please see this list. However, public domain dedication is still our spiritual ideal, as it aligns the closest to our mission and our principles.

If I use Project Elara's hardware/software/artwork/graphics, does my work have to be public domain too?

Not at all! You can (for almost all intents and purposes) do whatever you want with our work and relicense it to whatever you want - that is the point of public domain licensing. You can even redistribute it commercially or as part of a proprietary product or software, or change it to a different license and then embed it or sell it or share it. You don't even need to credit us or give us any attribution!

What am I not allowed to do, under public domain licensing?

As our work is under public domain, you are not allowed to hinder access to our work by claiming exclusive ownership over it, or to prevent us from making our work available to everyone. Once something is in the public domain, it is forever in the public domain, and by definition the work no longer belongs to any individual. This means that you cannot patent a copy of our work without making a significant and novel modification to it (and you shouldn't anyway). The basic idea is this:

You allowed to do whatever you want with your copy of our work (use it, share it, sell it, rename and relicense it) as long as you don't try to limit others' access to our work. Our work in the public domain is forever in the public domain.

Also, while this is not covered under our license and not a legal requirement, we assume good faith in that you will not try to abuse our work. You may choose to disregard this, but do so at your own risk. Just because you're allowed to do something doesn't mean you should. If we suspect that our work is being used for malicious purposes, including (but not limited to) extremist/terrorist/criminal activities, we will not hesitate to take firm actions against you, as we are obligated to do.

Why not a copyleft license or a license with stricter terms?

Before we start, please note that this is our organization's perspective only; others are free to choose whichever license suits them. We are not trying to say that any particular license is "bad" or "wrong", rather that it simply does not suit us. With that disclaimer out of the way, we have two reasons for avoiding alternative open-source licenses. Here's our reasoning:

The first - about why we've chosen to avoid using copyleft licenses like GPL/AGPL and instead dedicate our work to the public domain - is that somewhat paradoxically, public domain actually protects our work the best. Rather than deal with complicated questions of copyright and intellectual property - which is baked-in with such licenses as they explicitly enforce copyright - public domain means that nobody can copyright the work, and therefore the work will always remain publicly available to the maximum degree.

To make this more concrete, consider the story of Jonas Salk, who developed the life-saving polio vaccine, yet never patented his work: the vaccine was (and still is) essentially in the public domain. Had he (hypothetically) chosen to make his vaccine licensed under some sort of GPL-like license, the delays in deliveries to hospitals, manufacturing and distributing the vaccine, and possible legal obstacles to giving out the vaccine may have led many lives to be lost. We want to share our work and make it as easy to distribute as possible because we want our work to benefit people, not get mired in licensing arbitration and legal complications.

Recommended reading: To those wishing to learn more about our rationale, we highly recommend watching the Internet Archive’s 2023 Public Domain Day Celebration Video and this article about Creative Commons and Public Domain.

The second is that experience has shown that non-standard licenses, especially such licenses with strict terms (like the Hippocratic License), tend to hurt open-source communities far more than any good they have done. For instance, Douglas Crockford's infamous JSON license contained the line "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil". This particular line led to massive disruptions across community-maintained Linux systems due to broken software. There are far more effective ways to prevent software from being abused that do not end up causing this sort of issue — where a useless (however well-intended) declaration ends up harming the very communities it was made to benefit. We'd rather spend our time working on research and technologies that actually benefit people.

Both reasons have influenced our choice to adopt a maximally-permissive public domain license across all of our software, hardware, and creative/multimedia works. We want our work to stand for our values of putting people above profit (and in this case, above legal bickering and copyright arbitration). While a public domain license is not perfect, we believe it is the best way.

Are there things not under our public domain license?

Yes, we do have certain works that are not public domain. These come in different categories. First, in some of our repositories, we host software libraries/assets aren’t public-domain-licensed. For instance, our Handbook and our research documentation contain linked as well as self-hosted images that we did not create and are thus those images are not in the public domain, though the rest of the repository is. Some Project Elara repositories are under other open-source licenses, instead of public domain, out of respect for our community. Additionally, the following items are open-source but not public domain:

• Our logo and logotype, which can be freely used for creative purposes and re-used/shared, but if you choose to distribute a modified version, please give us attribution so others know your work is based off ours.
• The name of the project ("Project Elara") can only be used by non-Project Elara individuals or entities with clear attribution
• Creative works (non-software and non-hardware works, as well as the project's logo) are not universally in the public domain, as contributors to creative works can optionally choose to license their work under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license instead.

We do not feel the need to enforce the above restrictions on use unless we have to, and we fully support creative use/reuse of our logo and creating derivative works with similar names (or even forks with the same name/logo). However, if you are planning to use our name or logo, please attribute us!