# Licence

**Reckon Design System is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License,
version 3 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later).**

The full licence text is in [`licenses/AGPL-3.0.txt`](licenses/AGPL-3.0.txt) and
must travel with any copy or redistribution of this project.

```
Copyright (c) 2026 Reckon Design System contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along
with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
```

## Why AGPL and not MIT

Reckon is a recreation of `cosscom/coss`, whose default licence is AGPL-3.0. The
token layer — 207 custom properties, the whole visual foundation — is derived from
`packages/ui/src/styles/globals.css`, which sits under that default and has no
MIT-licensed equivalent anywhere in the repository. AGPL-3.0 is therefore the
licence this work already carries; anything narrower would be a claim the
provenance does not support.

Two consequences worth stating plainly:

- **A product built with Reckon is not automatically AGPL.** Using a design system
  to design an interface is use, not derivation. Copying Reckon's token files,
  component implementations or rules into your own distributed project is
  derivation, and the AGPL applies to that.
- **Network use counts.** §13 of the AGPL means a modified Reckon offered to users
  over a network must offer them its source.

If an MIT release is ever wanted, the token layer has to be re-derived from a
source that is not `packages/ui/` — see `NOTICE.md` §0. That work has not been
done and is not planned.

## Third-party material

This licence covers what is authored here. It does not cover the fonts, wordmarks,
icon paths, placeholder logos and photography redistributed alongside it, which
keep their own terms — and two of those are still open questions. Read
[`NOTICE.md`](NOTICE.md) before publishing anything.
