Licensing

Across the 26 public repositories: seventeen MIT, five GPL-3.0, two without a licence, two Apache-2.0. The two with no licence file are the ones where the choice has not been made yet, and until it is, nobody else has permission to do anything with the code.

This is not legal advice

I publish tools and read licences. I am not a lawyer. If the answer affects a product you sell or code you are paid to write, ask someone qualified. What follows is how I decide, not what you should do.

MIT and GPL-3.0, in practice

Both licences let anyone read, run, modify and redistribute the code. They differ in what happens after somebody changes it and passes it on.

MIT asks for attribution. Someone can take the code, modify it, ship it inside a closed product, and publish none of the changes. That is permitted and expected.

GPL-3.0 asks that the same freedoms travel with the code. Whoever distributes a modified version has to make its source available under the same terms. It does not forbid commercial use, and it does not oblige the author to work for free. It obliges whoever hands you a binary to be able to hand you the source too.

Three things worth knowing before choosing:

• GPL reaches across a distributed work. Linking GPL code into a closed program and shipping that program is the case the licence is written to stop.
• MIT places no such condition on the recipient. That is what makes it useful for code meant to be copied into somebody else’s project.
• Neither licence is triggered by private use. Modify either one for yourself, distribute nothing, and no obligation arises.

What each repository uses

Repository	Licence	What it is
plancia	GPL-3.0	Board for tasks Claude Code and Codex have open
rada	GPL-3.0	Queue for heavy jobs from parallel Claude Code sessions
varo	GPL-3.0	Claude Code plugin for shipping and auditing static sites
claude-codex-bridge	MIT	Moves a live coding session between Claude Code and Codex
scriba	MIT	Voice memo to speaker-labelled document, run locally
molo	MIT	Local queue for yt-dlp on Mac, Windows and Android
argano	MIT	Rebuilds the index of a video file that was never finalised
vesta	MIT	Virtual try-on with CatVTON running on Apple Silicon
snapchat-memories-to-photos	MIT	Snapchat export into Apple Photos with dates and places
wedding-invite-starter-kit	MIT	Self-hosted one page wedding invite, no backend

Ten of the repositories, seven MIT and three GPL-3.0. The table is a selection and not the whole list; the counts above it are computed over all of them.

Where the split holds and where it breaks

The tidy version would be that anything meant to stay open goes GPL and anything meant to be a building block goes MIT. Measured against the data, that rule only half survives.

What holds: nothing under GPL is a template. Everything designed to be taken and rebuilt is MIT, which is the starter kit and the one-shot import script. Copying is the point of both, and GPL would tax the copying for no gain.

Where it breaks: claude-codex-bridge sits in the same territory as the GPL three. It extends the same agent workflow, shares the claude-code, codex and agentic-coding topics with plancia, and it is MIT. So “agent tooling means GPL” is not the rule either.

Dates do not explain it either. The three GPL repositories were created on 2 and 4 August 2026. molo and argano were created on 2 August and are MIT, so the same week produced both answers.

plancia is GPL-3.0-or-later. Versions up to 0.2.0 were MIT and stay MIT. It also shows GPL does not block charging money. Building from source is free, a signed and notarised build is pay what you want, and the source stays available either way. That is what the licence requires and all it requires.

Other people’s licences

Licensing decides more than the file at the repository root. Three cases where somebody else’s terms changed what the code does:

• molo does not bundle ffmpeg, for licensing reasons set out in its NOTICE.md. Install it yourself with brew install ffmpeg. Without it molo still runs, limited to formats that already carry both streams, which usually means 720p.
• argano ships its own AAC parser in the browser build. The C library that finds AAC frame boundaries is under a licence the project cannot bundle, so the parser was written from the format specification and tested against 1218 real frame boundaries taken from four recordings.
• CatVTON and IDM-VTON, the try-on models vesta runs, carry non-commercial licences. The premium mode in vesta uses APIs that come with commercial terms instead.