ADR 0002 - MIT licence and naming constraints

Decisiondraft
On this page

Status

Partly decided. The licence is settled. The final project name is not, and this record is updated when it is chosen.

Context

Relay is compatible with a commercial product, in an ecosystem whose client libraries are MIT licensed and whose vendor also maintains the SDKs the project depends on. The vendor should be able to read this project as complementary to theirs, and both the licence and the name affect whether it looks that way.

Trademarks are a separate matter from copyright. Using a product name descriptively is ordinary; using it as your own project, package, or binary name is not.

Decision

License under MIT, matching the SDKs and the other open-source projects in this space. It is the least friction for anyone adopting the result and it carries no obligations that would discourage the vendor from treating the project as complementary.

Keep ecosystem trademarks out of the project's identity: not in the project name, package names, binary name, logo, or domain. Describing what Relay is compatible with in prose is fine and necessary, and the README carries a plain statement that the project is not affiliated with or endorsed by the vendor.

"Relay" is a working name. Before the first public release the name is checked for collisions across the package registries, container registries, and domains that matter, and a more distinctive variant is chosen if needed. The local repository directory is not the project name and does not constrain it.

Consequences

  • Anyone can fork, embed, or commercialise Relay. That is the intended outcome.
  • Naming is a release blocker. The name appears in a binary, a module path, and a container image, and changing it after publication is expensive.
  • Prose in the wiki names the compatibility target directly, which is descriptive use and is deliberate. The project's own identity does not.
  • Relay links and redistributes third-party MIT, BSD, and Apache licensed code (including the DBOS Go SDK). Upstream copyright notices and permission terms must be retained across all distribution artifacts. Attribution notices are maintained in NOTICE and THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md, included in release archives via .goreleaser.yaml, and installed into container images.