Open Source and Licensing

The Question Behind the Licence

Anyone trying to understand Koher quickly arrives at a question: what is the licensing model? The answer is not a single licence. Koher operates under a deliberate split state, and the split is worth explaining because the reasons matter more than the labels.

Three tools are under the MIT licence. Every tool released after 5 April 2026 is under AGPL-3.0. The split is not an oversight or a transition still in progress. It is a settled position with specific reasons.

The Split, Plainly

That is the rule. It will not change. The three MIT tools will not be relicensed; the new tools will not revert to MIT. If you want to know what licence a specific tool is under, look at its LICENSE file in the repository at github.com/koherarchitecture. The file will tell you.

Why MIT for the First Three

The three earliest tools were released into the world under MIT before the AGPL conversation had happened. The decision was uncomplicated at the time: MIT is the simplest permissive licence; it lets anyone use the code for anything; it asks for nothing in return except attribution. For tools intended to help students see their own thinking more clearly, that openness felt right.

Once a piece of code is in the world under MIT, it has been visited, read, and downloaded by people who took its licence at face value. Anyone who cloned the repository, ran the tool locally, or built something on top of it did so under the terms they saw at the time. Retroactively changing those terms creates confusion for exactly those people — the early users whose relationship with the code was formed under the original agreement. Koher has almost no outside contributors yet, so the usual "contributor consent" obstacle does not apply; but the user-trust obstacle does. The three MIT tools therefore stay MIT. This is a respect-for-prior-commitment decision, not a legal one.

Why AGPL-3.0 for Everything After

The AGPL decision was made on 5 April 2026, on advice from Abhas Abhinav, who sits on the board of the FSF India and has spent decades in free software. The conversation was about a specific risk: a service-side actor takes the code, hosts it as a network service, makes modifications to that hosted version, and never shares the modifications back. Under MIT, this is permitted. Under AGPL-3.0, anyone who hosts the modified code as a network service must share their modified source with users of that service. The note AGPL Licence, published the same day, records the decision and the reasoning in its original voice.

This protection matters for tools like Koher's. The diagnostic tools are designed to be hosted — either by the user themselves or by Koher's own demo infrastructure. Without AGPL, a well-funded actor could fork the code, host it as a paid service, modify it to work better for their paying customers, and never give those modifications back to the practitioners and students Koher exists to serve. With AGPL, that pathway is closed.

AGPL does not constrain the practitioner running the tool locally. It constrains the rehoster who refuses to share.

What the Split Means in Practice

For most people who encounter Koher, the licence makes no difference. If you are a student, a teacher, an artist, or a researcher who clones a repo, runs the tool on your own machine, and uses the output in your own work, both licences let you do exactly that — freely, without permission, without attribution requirements beyond what is in the code, without obligation to share anything. You may use the tools, modify them, integrate them into your teaching, build entirely different things with them. Neither MIT nor AGPL obstructs any of this.

The licences only diverge when the use case is hosting. If you fork a Koher tool, modify it, and run the modified version as a network service that other people use, the MIT tools impose no obligation on you, while the AGPL tools require you to share your modified source code with the users of your service. That is the entire practical difference.

Why Two Licences and Not Just One

It would have been simpler to relicense everything to AGPL or to keep everything under MIT. Both options were considered. Both were rejected.

Relicensing the three existing tools to AGPL would mean retroactively imposing terms on a body of work that the world received under different terms. That is the kind of move that erodes trust in open source projects: someone's code, released as theirs to use freely, suddenly becomes encumbered. Even if no one had actually built anything on top of the MIT releases yet, the principle would be wrong. The releases stay as they were.

Keeping everything under MIT going forward would leave the protective gap in place — the gap that lets a network rehoster benefit from the code without contributing back. For tools whose purpose is to serve practitioners rather than enrich rehosters, that gap matters. AGPL closes it.

The split state is honest about both commitments. It honours the original terms of the early releases and it protects the commons going forward. The cost is a small amount of explanation, like this article.

The Practice's Side of the Bargain

An open-source licence describes what users may do with the code. It does not describe what the maintainer commits to. Koher's practical commitments, separate from the licences, are these:

• The tools will remain free to use, always — not limited by licence period or revenue gate.
• The hosted demos at *-demo.koher.app will run while community funding lasts. When funding runs out, the demos pause; the source code does not change. Anyone can clone and run their own instance.
• New tools will be released openly as they crystallise — no closed-source phase, no embargoed period, no exclusive previews for paying customers.
• The AGPL decision will not be reversed quietly. If, at any point, new releases move to a different licence, that change will be announced clearly with reasons.
• If a contributor disagrees with the AGPL choice and wants to fork to MIT, the source is available. Forks are welcome.

These commitments are not legally binding the way a licence is. They are statements of intent, and they hold for as long as the practice does. Koher is a ten-year practice; the commitments are scoped to that frame.

For the Reader Who Came Here from Elsewhere

Most readers of this article are here because they are deciding whether to use, fork, or contribute to a Koher tool, or because they are evaluating Koher for some external purpose — advisory work, funding, research alignment, teaching adoption. The takeaways are:

• You can use the tools. Both licences allow it.
• You can modify them. Both licences allow it.
• You can clone them and run them locally. Both licences allow it.
• If you want to host a modified Koher tool as a service, the three MIT tools let you do so without sharing your changes; the AGPL tools require you to share. Choose accordingly.
• If you want to contribute to a Koher tool, the contribution will be released under that tool's existing licence (MIT or AGPL, as appropriate).

If you have a question that this article does not answer, write to hello@koher.app. The licence files in each repository are the canonical reference. This article is the explanation.

The split is a settled position with specific reasons. The reasons matter more than the labels.