Licensing
What is actually open, under which licence, and where the gaps are.
This site said “MIT licensed” for a long time. That was too simple. The umbrella repository is MIT; the components inside it carry their own licences, which take precedence for their part of the tree. Some are permissive, some are copyleft, one is non-commercial only, and a few have no licence file at all. Vibemind is MIT with exceptions, not MIT across the board.
Component by component
| Component | Public | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| vibemind-os (the umbrella repository) | Yes | MIT |
| Operations and security suite (directories inside the umbrella since May 2026, public with it since 1 September 2026) | Yes | MIT, as part of the umbrella |
| OpenFang (agent runtime, our fork) | Yes | Apache-2.0 OR MIT |
| OpenClaw (gateway, our fork) | Yes | MIT, as upstream |
| Coding engine | Yes | Apache-2.0 |
| Voice dialog | Yes | MIT |
| Code search | Yes | MIT |
| Shared libraries | Yes | MIT |
| Desktop automation | Yes | MIT |
| Rowboat (knowledge space, fork) | Yes | Apache-2.0 |
| Captain Cook, Laura (video) | Yes | MIT — but the commits pinned in the public snapshot predate the licence file |
| MiroFish (forecasting, vendored fork) | Yes | AGPL-3.0 |
| LearnHouse and PenEcho (learning, forks) | Yes | AGPL-3.0 |
| TRIBE v2 (research model inside the Brain) | Yes | CC BY-NC 4.0 — non-commercial only |
| swe_desgine (requirements and design pipeline) | Yes | AI Scientist Source Code License — use restrictions |
| Sales station (sales-claw) | Yes | No licence file |
| Learning wrapper (vibemind-learning) | Yes | No licence file yet; AGPL-3.0 decided, to match LearnHouse |
| V1 snapshot | Yes | No licence file on the default branch; MIT on master since August 2026 |
| One video utilities submodule | No | Private |
One component listed here in September is no longer part of the stack and has been dropped from the table.
What this means for you
- A recursive clone stops at one private submodule
- A recursive clone of the public umbrella repository fails at one private video submodule. Everything else is reachable anonymously. The public repository is a snapshot from 1 September 2026 and has not been updated since, so a clone does not give you the current state.
- Apache-2.0 OR MIT means you choose
- OpenFang is dual-licensed; you may use it under either. The coding engine and Rowboat are Apache-2.0, which carries a patent grant and attribution requirements MIT does not. If your legal review cares about the difference, it matters.
- Non-commercial means non-commercial
- TRIBE v2 is part of the Brain’s tree, so a default clone includes it. Its licence excludes commercial use. If you plan to use Vibemind commercially, that component has to be removed or replaced first — and so do we, which is an open decision on our side.
- Copyleft over a network
- MiroFish, LearnHouse and PenEcho are AGPL-3.0. If you run a modified version for users who reach it over a network, you have to offer those users the source of the version you are running. None of them is offered to outside users today.
- Use restrictions travel with the code
- The AI Scientist licence on swe_desgine permits commercial use but prohibits certain uses, and those prohibitions have to be passed on in any agreement under which the code is used or distributed.
- No licence means no permission
- Several public components carry no licence file. Publicly visible source with no licence grants you no rights beyond viewing it. That is a gap, not a choice, and it needs closing.
Models and third-party services
Some AI models used in parts of the stack are licensed for non-commercial use only — among them face-analysis models from InsightFace, the face-restoration model CodeFormer, the lip-sync model Wav2Lip, and a small vision model used in the marketing space. They sit in video, face and image tooling, not in routing or execution, and they would have to be replaced before any commercial use. The image models used for marketing are openly licensed.
Vibemind also drives third-party services it does not ship — among them a workflow automation tool under a source-available licence that is not open source, and databases and observability tools under copyleft or source-available licences. If you run Vibemind yourself, you run those services under their own licences.
What changed since September
- OpenFang is Apache-2.0 OR MIT. We said “Apache-2.0, not MIT”; that was wrong.
- Operations and the security suite are not private submodules. They have been ordinary directories inside the umbrella repository since May 2026, and public with it since 1 September 2026. The clone fails for a different reason: one private video submodule.
- The OpenClaw licence question is settled. Upstream is MIT — its licence detection was broken and has since been fixed — and our fork carries the upstream MIT notice. No relicensing was involved. We previously said it needed a legal read.
- TRIBE v2, swe_desgine, MiroFish, LearnHouse and PenEcho were missing from this page entirely. They are the components whose licences matter most.
- “Three components without a licence” was too low.
What is still open
- Add licence files to the components that have none
- Decide what happens to the non-commercial research model in the Brain: replace it, make it optional, or clarify its terms
- Replace the non-commercial models before any commercial use
- Update or replace the public snapshot, so that a clone completes and reflects the current state
- State the licence per component everywhere, instead of one blanket word