Announcing our community editions

Jacky Song | October 12, 2025

At Project Elara, we believe strongly in our mission to build a better future. But we also understand the need to be grounded in reality and not stubbornly refuse to change when change is needed. For this reason, we're announcing a new, supplemental model of development for the project: community edition libraries.

As per this recent directive, Project Elara now supports using the MIT license as a license choice for new and existing libraries. This is a major change for the project, which previously had only public domain libraries. So why did we do this?

The answer is that we've realized that we have to balance our idealistic vision with accomodating the needs of our members and contributors. Contributing to open-source projects can be very intimidating, particularly when you're required to sign off the rights to your work, which is required of a public domain license. Pushing would-be contributors away and making existing contributors uncomfortable is the last thing we want to do, so we've decided that from now on, we will default to the MIT license for new repositories.

But what about our original public-domain software libraries, you might ask? I am of the firm belief that they should always stay dedicated to the public domain. As a solution, we have decided to adopt a system of community edition libraries. These are forked from our original public-domain licensed libraries, and relicensed to the MIT license (which you can always do with a public domain license, and is one of its strengths).

Contributors are now encouraged to send their contributions to the community editions of our libraries, like elara-math, elara-gfx, and others, but this in no way takes away our original public domain-licensed libraries, which we now refer to as original editions. The original edition libraries will continue to be developed (albeit much more slowly). Here is an excerpt from the elara-math original edition README describing our approach:

"...Project Elara's original edition libraries are still essential - they form the public domain core of the project, which we do believe tremendously in the value in. So if you are sure you want to dedicate your work to the public domain, go ahead and contribute here..."

Again, we are not abandoning our dedication to giving our work away for free and making it accessible to everyone. We are passionate about open-source and Project Elara is always going to be an open-source project. But we hope that this change will help it grow and help make things easier for our community, as well as encouraging more people to contribute - something that will ultimately be beneficial as a whole.