0002. Public repository under the MIT licence

Status

Accepted. Date: 2026-11-04.

Context

Hephaestus is the forge every NeoForge product and research project is built from. NeoForge builds to sell, and a buyer must receive everything needed to run the product. A private dependency they cannot own stalls due diligence. Plumbing is not the moat; products, customers and data are.

Decision

The repository Neoforge-Labs/hephaestus is public and MIT-licensed. Product-specific logic never enters it.

Consequences

A buyer inherits an MIT dependency with no licence negotiation, so a sale stays clean, and building in public is possible. Everything committed is world-readable, so secrets and code we do not own must never land here. In particular DataQRL and Backbone code is not ours to copy (CLAUDE.md rule 9); only NeoForge and cod3smith repos are harvested. Anyone, including competitors, may reuse the kit.