Status: accepted
Context
An accounting core must not become somebody's closed service, while file-format libraries are most useful when anyone can embed them.
Decision
AGPL-3.0 for the core; MIT for the format libraries. The formats' value is ubiquity — inside other software, a software house or an administration. The core's value is that nobody can turn it into a closed service. Installing and running it internally, modified or not, obliges the installer to nothing.
A contributor licence agreement is mandatory, so the project can change its licence if it ever must.
The line between free and paid is operational, not functional. If it keeps working when Ekwo disappears, it is free. Removing the footer attribution is never sold: it is an attribution, not a toll. What is operated — transmission through certified access points, deposits with an administration, bank connections, credentials, instances watched over time — is a service; the proof it produces lives in the customer's database.
The paid line is a set of services, not a directory of this repository.
There was once an ee/ folder here, with its own licence, waiting for
commercial code to ship beside the core. Nothing ever belonged in it: every
paid thing is a contract, a certificate, a credential or a machine somebody
keeps running, and none of that is a feature one could put behind a flag in
source that other people install. The folder is gone, and what this repository
publishes is the whole of what it ships. The services are operated by Ekwo
(EKWO OÜ) and described in cloud-services.md.
No adapter imitating another product's API. Nobody consumes an imitation server; integrations read the real product. The route to national filing tools is their official formats. A published field mapping costs a fraction of an adapter and is more useful.
Ekwo describes itself by what it does and the standards it follows, not
against named products; check:no-competitor-names enforces it.
Consequences
- Anyone may run and modify the core internally without obligation.
- Paid features never gate accounting functionality.
See also
LICENSE,MANIFESTO.mdcloud-services.md— the optional paid services, where the line falls, and what will never be soldmapping.md- 0048 Format libraries are MIT