narratio/docs/roadmap/policy.md

Align Licensing Documentation With the Standard Policy

Status: Accepted; implementation pending.

Goal

Adopt the upstream licensing-documentation conventions without changing Narratio's license, runtime behavior, or release responsibility boundary. Make project licensing and upstream attribution easy to find and maintain through ordinary development and release preparation.

This roadmap defines the target and scope, not implementation sequencing.

Current Baseline

The standard policy checkout at ../policy, reviewed on 2026-09-26, provides OSS policy v1.2 and licensing additions in documentation policy v1.5 and release policy v1.2. Its standard license reference collection supplies reusable texts; it is not a bundle that every consumer must copy in full.

Narratio currently has:

• A root COPYRIGHT identifying Narratio, its copyright holder, and the GPL-3.0-or-later grant, warranty disclaimer, and third-party-material caveat.
• A complete root LICENSE matching the upstream GPLv3 reference text except for a missing final newline. No substantive licensing correction is needed.
• Documentation policy based on v1.1, without the new licensing ownership map, and no docs/policy/oss.md or docs/oss/ attribution collection.
• A README without the prescribed closing license and attribution navigation.
• Release policy and procedure without the new licensing footer convention. The existing Woodpecker publisher already uses the matching checked-in release document as the hosted Gitea release body.

Narratio publishes source and tagged Linux amd64/arm64 and best-effort macOS arm64 binaries with checksums. Successful publication of the intended tag to origin remains the release command's responsibility boundary; asset publication is asynchronous. The current dependency graph includes ConfigKit, AWS modules, Go extension packages, YAML libraries, and test dependencies. This roadmap does not claim that their individual terms or attribution coverage have been audited.

Targeted End State

The existing project grant remains unchanged. A tailored OSS policy governs licensing documentation, and a canonical attribution inventory accurately describes material incorporated into or distributed with Narratio. Applicable standard texts are available locally; project-specific upstream notices and source links identify the actual imported commits.

README and future release documents navigate to these canonical materials. Contributors can discover the policy from the development guide and maintain attribution in the same change as the relevant dependency or distribution change. There is no duplicate inventory, new licensing service, or additional release approval system.

Required Changes

Adopt a Tailored OSS Policy

Add docs/policy/oss.md from upstream v1.2, retaining its actual base version and recording the adoption date. Remove template instructions and adapt links that point to template-only examples or reference collections. Do not introduce placeholder documents merely to satisfy those links.

Identify Narratio's existing application license and connect the policy to the canonical repository and release documentation for its Gitea host, distribution channels, and publication mechanism. Preserve the author's license choice; adoption is not relicensing. Leave COPYRIGHT and LICENSE substantively intact; normalizing the final newline is optional formatting only.

Retain upstream's House Format and settled interpretation of notice links: project-specific license and attribution material is linked at its imported commit rather than copied locally solely because its terms use reproduction, inclusion, or copy language. This convention does not establish license compatibility or discharge distinct obligations such as modified-file notices or corresponding source. Preserve required notices in incorporated source. Record concrete obligations or unresolved rights questions outside the format with their reason and selected treatment; do not invent exceptions based on common ownership or require repeated approval of the settled convention.

Establish Canonical Ownership and Contributor Routing

Incorporate the licensing-related additions from upstream documentation policy v1.5 into docs/policy/documentation.md, preserving Narratio-specific ownership and existing unrelated decisions. Clearly assign:

• Project identity, copyright, and grant to COPYRIGHT.
• Complete project license text to LICENSE.
• General licensing and attribution conventions to docs/policy/oss.md.
• Component-specific attribution to docs/oss/attribution.md.
• Verbatim standard dependency license texts to docs/oss/licenses/.
• Navigation to README and release notes; concrete release URL construction and publication mechanics to docs/release.md.

Record the selective upstream adoption accurately; do not imply the entire upstream policy set has been adopted by merely changing version metadata. Add a task-specific reading route in docs/development.md for licensing, dependency, attribution, and release-document changes. Avoid repeating the OSS rules in the agent, architecture, or testing policies.

Establish the Attribution Inventory

Review actual incorporated and distributed material, including relevant transitive dependencies, Go runtime material in binaries, and copied code or assets. Use the selected source revisions and actual use/distribution to decide coverage, not just direct entries in go.mod. Neither every development tool nor every separately installed subprocess application automatically belongs in the inventory. Review any such component if Narratio actually incorporates or distributes it.

Create docs/oss/attribution.md with the upstream five-field format: project name, faithful upstream copyright statements, applicable SPDX expression, license/notice links, and a source repository link. Preserve multiple statements, licensing alternatives, versions, and exceptions where applicable. Do not infer ownership or invent identifiers; identify nonstandard terms through their texts.

Resolve source and notice links to the exact imported commit, including for copied material. Version tags and moving branches are not substitutes for those component commit links. Inspect the selected source's license and notices rather than assuming terms from a dependency name or current upstream main branch.

Copy only the applicable complete, unmodified standard texts into docs/oss/licenses/. Reuse a text across entries where appropriate, but preserve distinct versions and exceptions. Make required companion texts directly reachable from the affected entry; LGPLv3, if applicable, includes GPLv3. Classify upstream files by content, not filename: a LICENSE file containing project-specific notices may require both its upstream link and a local standard text link. Keep explanatory prose outside the verbatim texts.

Add README and Release Navigation

End README with two friendly statements linking to the existing GPL v3-or-later grant in COPYRIGHT and the new attribution document.

Update docs/policy/release.md to reference the OSS footer convention, and docs/release.md to give the concrete Narratio Gitea URL construction. Each new release document and its hosted download page must end with three links whose visible text is COPYRIGHT | LICENSE | ATTRIBUTION. Use absolute URLs at that release's immutable tag or corresponding immutable source revision. Unlike upstream component links, these release-navigation links may use the release tag.

Retain reuse of the checked-in release note by .woodpecker/release.yml; no new publisher is expected. Prepare the footer alongside the note and verify its intended paths against the candidate source. A future tag need not already resolve remotely. Do not add publication-time network checks or CI polling.

Keep Ongoing Maintenance Proportionate

Update affected entries, source/notice commit links, and texts in changes that add, remove, upgrade, copy, or alter distribution of relevant components. Review faithful license text copies, statements, and destinations through ordinary change review and existing local documentation checks.

Apply the formatting convention prospectively. Do not retrofit published tags, release notes, binaries, or checksums. Any actual historical omission discovered during the inventory requires deliberate treatment under the applicable terms and existing release correction policy, not silent rewriting of a release.

Scope Boundaries

• No license change, automatic copyright-year advancement, or blanket per-file header requirement.
• No mandatory scanner, full SBOM, recurring legal sign-off, new release approval gate, or new network availability requirement.
• No automatic requirement for separate downloadable license assets, source bundles, or a different binary packaging format. Concrete obligations found during the inventory still require their applicable treatment.
• No changes to application behavior, dependency versions, platform support, or successful-tag-push release completion.
• No wholesale replacement of Narratio-specific policy with generic templates.
• No adoption in this scope of upstream release v1.2's broader changes to validation, repeated checks, fixed note sections, or release preparation. Those changes warrant a separate deliberate review of policy, scripts, and tests. The licensing additions must not silently enact them.

Completion Evidence

The tailored policy and ownership/routing changes are present; the inventory covers the material identified by the source/distribution review; entries have faithful notices and exact source revisions; applicable local texts and companion links are complete; README and release guidance provide the prescribed navigation; and local documentation checks pass. Historical releases and existing publication guards remain unchanged. Review must establish these facts rather than treating the mere existence of new Markdown files as completion.

No product decisions remain open for this scope. Component-specific rights or distribution questions discovered during the inventory must be surfaced with evidence rather than guessed or expanded into blanket restrictions.