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Licensing and distribution

Approved license and scope

On 2026-10-22, maintainer Jorim Tielemans approved Apache-2.0 for all original project material, including both crates and artwork, subject to checking existing contributions and third-party exclusions. The approval also confirms the same scope for the separate ElevenClock-rs project; its own licensing record and legacy exclusions remain authoritative for that project.

The root LICENSE, both Cargo manifests and the RPM spec agree. Copyright is attributed to scat contributors; individual authors retain their rights. The scope includes scat (Linux client, TUI and catalog publisher), scat-embed, tooling, documentation, configuration examples, generated help, completions/man pages, the static website, assets/icon.svg and its PNG/ICO derivatives. The website build copies LICENSE and NOTICE alongside its assets.

scat-embed is a separate utility for producing embedding sidecars, with a Windows CI build. Neither Linux clients nor the catalog publisher need it installed. It has its own dependency graph and generated notices.

Provenance review and exclusions

A repository-history and explicit-attribution review on 2026-10-22 found commits by the maintainer, dependency bots, and one Vibe Nuage Agent change (0e14bb2842d4649a435aaae95ee4604cc22c8615, database indexes/tests), co-authored by the maintainer. No explicit copied-code attribution was found in src/, crates/, assets/ or site/. The artwork source and generation process are recorded in assets/README.md. This is a limited technical review, not an exhaustive authorship audit or a claim that Git authorship alone establishes ownership. Newly discovered upstream material or contributor rights must be reviewed before inclusion under the project license.

Third-party dependencies, bundled SQLite/native code, Rust toolchain components, and downloaded embedding models retain their own terms. Apache-2.0 does not relicense them or grant trademark rights. Cataloged scripts and their contents also remain under their owners’ terms; using scat does not relicense a catalog. Model downloads/cache contents are not part of the executable release bundles. Review the selected model’s terms separately before deployment or redistribution.

Release notices

Release CI uses cargo-about to produce THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt from Cargo.lock for each executable. The small about.toml and about.hbs files configure license selection and plain-text formatting; two entries retrieve missing MIT attribution from upstream. Build-only and development dependencies are excluded. The Windows file also includes native ONNX Runtime notices; Linux includes musl and GCC runtime notices.

Standalone artifacts contain LICENSE, NOTICE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt beside the executable. The RPM installs those three files under /usr/share/licenses/scat as %license; the existing UBI smoke check verifies that they are present and nonempty. The notice file links to the exact published crate sources; dependency sources are not bundled.

Distribution checklist