Licence
Open source, honestly.
Every line of beatrax is public, readable, buildable and modifiable. It is also licensed in a way the Open Source Initiative does not certify — and pretending otherwise would be the kind of thing this page exists to avoid.
What you can actually do
The practical freedoms most people mean by open source, you have:
- Read all of it — The full source, the specification behind it, and the reasoning for every architectural decision.
- Build and run it yourself — Clone, install the toolchain, build the desktop bundle. No licence key, no activation, no phone-home.
- Modify it — Fork it, patch it, run your own build indefinitely.
- Leave with your data — It's a SQLite file on your disk. Export it, read it with any SQLite tool, take it elsewhere.
Where it diverges
beatrax is licensed under the Hippocratic License 3.0. It grants those freedoms and then adds ethical-use conditions on top — restrictions on using the software to cause specific kinds of harm.
The Open Source Definition does not allow a licence to restrict a field of endeavour, so any licence with such clauses cannot be OSI-approved, no matter how uncontroversial the restriction. That makes beatrax source-available rather than open source in the OSI sense. Both statements are true at once, and this page would rather say both than pick the flattering one.
Why not MIT or GPL
Because the licence is the only lever a small project has to say what it will not be part of, and giving that up costs nothing today but everything later.
The reasoning is written out in full in the product repository, alongside the parts of that argument that are genuinely contested. It is a trade, not a free win: the cost is real, and it is mostly borne in conversations exactly like this one.
The full rationale lives in NOTICE.md in the product repository.
What this means in practice
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Can I read the source? | Yes, all of it. |
| Can I run it without paying? | Yes. There is no paid tier and no licence key. |
| Can I modify it for my own use? | Yes. |
| Can I fork and redistribute? | Yes, under the same licence. |
| Can I use it commercially? | Yes, subject to the ethical-use clauses. |
| Is it OSI-approved open source? | No — and the licence text explains exactly why. |
| Will it ever become MIT or GPL? | No plan to. That decision would be recorded publicly if it changed. |
The name
The licence covers the code. The beatrax name and mark are not part of that grant — fork the software freely, but ship your fork under your own name so nobody is misled about what they're installing.
What happens to what you contribute
Contributions are accepted under the same licence as the project. There is no copyright assignment and no contributor licence agreement to sign — you keep ownership of your work, and it is licensed to everyone on the same terms as the rest.