The repository is licensed per component. SolidLSP (src/solidlsp,
test/solidlsp, test/resources) remains MIT-licensed and independently
reusable; the Serena application (src/serena, src/interprompt, scripts,
test/serena, docs) is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later starting with the v2
licensing transition. The change is not retroactive: all releases and
commits up to v1.7.0 / 74c38a65 (tag mit-final) remain available under MIT.
Since MIT is GPL-compatible, a distribution combining both (such as the
serena-agent package) is as a whole subject to GPL-3.0-or-later, while the
SolidLSP files themselves stay MIT and can be extracted and used separately
under MIT terms. The distribution metadata therefore declares
GPL-3.0-or-later, with both license texts shipped alongside it.
Serena originally began under the GPL (v2) and was switched to MIT in
May 2025 following community requests. We consider that change a mistake;
the substantial changes in v2 make this the appropriate time to revert it.
We want the best version of Serena to remain free.
Changes:
* LICENSE is now the licensing overview; canonical license texts live in
LICENSES/ (MIT.txt is the previous LICENSE verbatim, GPL-3.0-or-later.txt
is the unmodified FSF text)
* pyproject.toml declares the PEP 639 license expression
"GPL-3.0-or-later" and bundles LICENSE and LICENSES/* as license files;
the deprecated MIT classifier is dropped and flake.nix declares gpl3Plus;
README has per-component license badges and a License section
* SPDX-License-Identifier headers in all Python sources under src/ and
scripts/, added by the new idempotent scripts/add_spdx_headers.py, which
gen_prompt_factory.py also uses to keep the header on the generated
module; existing third-party notices are preserved
* CLA.md: Contributor License Agreement (contributor retains copyright;
grants a perpetual, irrevocable license including relicensing under any
terms, incl. proprietary/commercial; patent grant; authority
representations), to be enforced repository-wide via cla-assistant.io
* CONTRIBUTING.md, PR template and a new docs page explain the licensing
boundary and the CLA workflow
Black dependency created a dependabot warning and couldn't be bumped since it collided with pathspec dependencies. Since ruff can also format, black is not needed. But we now have these small format changes, mostly in test files
Dominik Jain