Licensing
Runink River is open source. Its own code and documentation are MIT; two packaging trees are
deliberately not, because of what they package. The authoritative per-path mapping is
REUSE.toml with the licence texts in LICENSES/, checked in CI
with reuse lint; the reasoning is in docs/LICENSING.md. Where a summary and
REUSE.toml disagree, REUSE.toml wins.
The licence map
| What | Licence |
|---|---|
| Runink River’s own userspace: the installer, the scripts and build tooling, the configuration and s6 service tree, the workflows, and this documentation | MIT |
The kernel packaging tree, build/pkgbuilds/runink-kernel/ (PKGBUILD, configuration, patches) | GPL-2.0-only |
The OpenZFS packaging tree, build/pkgbuilds/runink-zfs/ | CDDL-1.0, built as a separate, out-of-tree module package, never merged into the kernel |
Runink River artwork files, as REUSE.toml maps them | CC-BY-4.0 |
| The Runink River community mark (the mascot and the logos, icons, splash and wallpaper rendered from it) and the Runink name | LicenseRef-Runink-Trademark: all rights reserved |
| Third-party files (for example the CachyOS Emerald wallpapers, GPL-3.0-only) | their upstream licence |
MIT is compatible with shipping the GPL-2.0 kernel and the CDDL-1.0 ZFS modules as
separate packages in the same image. The ZFS boundary (a prebuilt module package, never
CONFIG_ZFS=y) is explained in docs/governance/ZFS-LICENSING.md.
No proprietary components
Every file in the repository is under an open licence, except the marks, which are reserved
as a trademark and can be swapped out. Products may be built on Runink River outside
this repository, as a downstream distribution or an out-of-tree payload
(RIVER_PAYLOAD_DIR); their licences travel with them. An image built without a payload,
which the public Runink River image always is, is complete and fully open.
Using the marks
The marks identify unchanged Runink River releases. A modified or community build replaces
them; see Brand assets for what is covered and
LICENSES/LicenseRef-Runink-Trademark.txt for the terms.
New files
Every new file declares its licence in an SPDX header, or in REUSE.toml if it cannot carry
a comment:
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 The RIVER Authors
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT“The RIVER Authors” are the copyright holders recorded in the git history. Contributions are made under the DCO, not a CLA. Who decides what, and how, is on Governance.