The license, in plain language

MeetingWords is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License 1.0 (CPAL), an OSI-approved open-source license. Here's what it means for you, by who you are. The license text itself is authoritative; this page is the honest summary.

If you're self-hosting for yourself or your team

Run it, modify it, enjoy it — free, forever. Keep the one-line "runs MeetingWords" attribution in the footer. That's essentially the whole deal.

If you're running it as a service for others

Also fine — CPAL is open source, and running a public MeetingWords service is allowed and welcome. Two obligations: keep the attribution line, and if you've modified the software, make your modifications' source available to your users (CPAL §15 — network use counts as distribution). One thing the license doesn't grant: the MeetingWords name is a trademark of the original service; call your service something of your own.

If you're a company that wants to embed it in a product

CPAL's attribution and source-sharing terms apply to embedded uses too. If your lawyers would rather not — attribution removal and proprietary embedding are available under a commercial license: support@meetingwords.com.

If you want to contribute

Welcome — once the repository is public, issues and pull requests open. Small fixes come in with a simple sign-off (the Developer Certificate of Origin). Substantive contributions use a short contributor agreement that does two things: it licenses your contribution back under CPAL, and it lets the project offer commercial exceptions (attribution removal, proprietary embedding) and migrate the license if that ever serves the project — including to a more permissive one.

In return, the agreement binds us — and anyone who ever acquires these rights: your contribution, and every release containing it, will always also be available under an OSI-approved open-source license. Commercial exceptions add licenses; they never subtract the open one.

The candid why: commercial licenses fund the hosted service and the maintenance every self-hoster rides on — selling exceptions to copyleft is a practice with a long free-software pedigree. Substantial contributors are named in the project's NOTICE and get a free Pro account for as long as the hosted service operates under our stewardship.

Why CPAL?

Lineage and fit. CPAL was created at Socialtext — the collaborative-software company from the same chapter of life that produced the original MeetingWords service — and brought to the OSI in 2007. It's built for exactly this shape of project: genuinely open software, with an attribution line that lets every deployment point home, and a network clause that keeps service-side modifications open.