Stoatworks Labs

About

The MIT licence, in full

Almost everything published here is MIT-licensed. It's about as permissive as a licence gets: use it commercially, fork it, change it, ship it inside your own product, and you owe nobody anything except keeping the copyright notice attached.

The text below is the licence verbatim, the same bytes as the LICENSE file in each MIT repo. Where a repo carries something different, it's listed at the bottom of this page and stated in the repo itself. One case is worth reading before you redistribute anything: the JUCE audio plugins keep MIT source but ship AGPLv3 binaries.

LICENSESPDX: MIT
MIT License

Copyright (c) 2026 Stoatworks Labs

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

What that means in practice

You can

  • Use it commercially, on a paying show, without asking.
  • Modify it, and keep your changes to yourself.
  • Ship it inside a closed-source product.
  • Redistribute it, sell it, or fork it and take it somewhere else.

You must

  • Keep the copyright notice and the licence text with the source.

That's the whole obligation. There's no share-alike clause, no attribution-in-the-UI requirement, and nothing to register.

You get no

  • Warranty of any kind.
  • Guarantee of fitness for a particular purpose.
  • Liability cover if it goes wrong in front of an audience.

Which is why every repo states separately what has been tested against real hardware and what has only ever run in simulation. Check it in your own rig first.

The exceptions

Not every repo is MIT. These 6 carry something else, each for a specific reason.

  • canary

    CERN-OHL-S-2.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · MIT

    Open hardware, licensed in three parts: the board under the CERN strongly reciprocal hardware licence, the enclosure and documentation under CC BY-SA, and the firmware and tools under MIT. A software licence says nothing useful about a circuit board or a printable case, so each part carries the instrument made for it.

  • nc-filedropbatch

    AGPL-3.0

    A Nextcloud app. Nextcloud is AGPL and an app that lives inside it inherits that, so this one couldn't be MIT even if I wanted it to be.

  • openrcs-protocol

    CC BY 4.0

    Protocol documentation rather than code. A software licence is the wrong tool for a document, so it carries a Creative Commons licence instead: use it, quote it, build on it, with credit.

  • resodoom

    GPL-2.0-only

    Doom as a Resolume source. It ships doomgeneric, which descends from id Software's GPL release of the Doom source, and anything linked into it inherits that. The parts that aren't about Doom are split out under MIT as stagehand.

  • stoatworks-parts

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    The printed parts' models. A software licence is the wrong tool for a 3D model, and I'm going to sell printed ones, so this one lets anyone print, change and share them with credit but not sell them. Added 25 October 2026.

  • voicelevel

    GPL-3.0-or-later

    Built on nih-plug, whose VST3 bindings are GPLv3. A VST3 build is therefore a GPL work, and rather than license the source one way and ship the binaries another, the whole repo is GPL, source included.

Third-party code bundled inside these projects keeps its own licence (the MIT licence here covers my work, not the SDKs it's built on), and so do the forks of other people's projects on my GitHub. Everything bundled, and the terms it comes under, is listed on inspirations and attributions.

Where the binaries differ from the source

6 of the audio plugins are built on JUCE, whose modules are licensed AGPLv3 or commercially, with no permissive option. Nothing here is licensed commercially, so the AGPLv3 arm applies, which makes the released binaries a combined work conveyed under the AGPLv3, even though the source in the repo stays MIT.

There's no conflict between the two licences: MIT code may be combined into an AGPL work, and that's exactly what happens at link time. But the distinction changes what you may do with what you download, so it's worth saying rather than leaving for someone to discover.

  • Using the plugins changes nothing. Install them and run them on any show, commercial or not. The AGPL constrains distribution, not use, and its network clause doesn't apply to a desktop plugin.
  • Their source is still MIT. If you hold a JUCE commercial licence, you can build it into a closed product exactly as the LICENSE file says.
  • Redistributing these binaries is AGPLv3. That includes making the corresponding source available, which is the repo at its tagged commit plus JUCE at its pinned tag, both public already.

This describes what the licences already require. It isn't an extra restriction I'm adding, and it isn't legal advice.

Why MIT

Because the alternative helps nobody here. These are tools for a working industry, and a technician who wants to fix a bug on a flight case in the small hours shouldn't have to think about licence compatibility first. A copyleft licence would keep the derivatives open, which sounds better than it works out in practice, because it would also keep the tools out of the commercial products where several of these problems actually need solving.

Attribution is welcome and never required. If one of these ends up in something you shipped, I'd love to hear about it, but you're under no obligation to tell me.

See also: inspirations and attributions and the infrastructure that makes this possible.