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.
ee/ lives in this repository, with its own licence. A separate repository
would make every schema change a two-repository coordination.
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, credentials —
is in ee/; the proof it produces lives in the customer's database.
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.