# Radicle licensing update: explicit docs/code split and new Terms of Service

**URL:** https://discourse.roots.io/t/radicle-licensing-update-explicit-docs-code-split-and-new-terms-of-service/30344
**Category:** radicle
**Created:** 2026-05-12T23:41:59Z
**Posts:** 1

## Post 1 by @ben — 2026-05-12T23:42:00Z

Heads up to anyone working with Radicle — we’ve opened a PR ([https://github.com/roots/radicle/pull/344](https://github.com/roots/radicle/pull/344)) that clarifies the repo’s licensing structure and adds a new [`TERMS.md`](https://github.com/roots/radicle/blob/main/TERMS.md). Wanted to give the community context on what’s changing, why, and what it means for customers.

## What’s changing

- [`LICENSE.md`](https://github.com/roots/radicle/blob/main/LICENSE.md) — still MIT, with a short scope clause at the top making explicit that the MIT grant covers source code, not documentation
- [`docs/LICENSE.md`](https://github.com/roots/radicle/blob/main/docs/LICENSE.md) — new, proprietary; makes clear the documentation is licensed to Radicle customers only
- [`TERMS.md`](https://github.com/roots/radicle/blob/main/TERMS.md) — new, plain-English explanation of what customer access does and doesn’t include

## Why now

Recently a public repo turned up that took the Radicle source, paraphrased the docs, and republished the whole thing as a free MIT-licensed starter. The code being MIT isn’t something we can really walk back — anything that ships alongside WordPress needs to be GPL-compatible, and MIT is the cleanest fit with the rest of the Roots stack (Bedrock, Sage, and Acorn are all MIT).

What gave the situation room to happen was the structure of our `LICENSE.md`. We were using the standard MIT template, which grants rights to “this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’).” With a `docs/` folder at the repo root, that phrasing creates enough ambiguity that someone can read the docs as MIT-licensed alongside the source. They weren’t ever meant to be — but the structure didn’t make that clear at the file level, and that’s a gap we should have closed long ago.

This PR closes it. The new structure makes the code/docs split obvious at every level: a scope clause at the top of the root `LICENSE.md`, a separate proprietary license in `docs/`, and a discoverability note in the README.

## What this means for customers

**Nothing changes for normal Radicle use.** You can still build sites, deploy to production, customize for client projects, work with your team and contractors, and write publicly about techniques you’ve picked up. All of that is explicitly permitted in `TERMS.md`.

What’s now explicit, rather than implied:

- The documentation has always been customer-only — that’s now visible at the file level instead of being read between the lines
- **The repo as a whole isn’t meant to be republished publicly**

Radicle is a paid product, and it’s meant to stay between us and our customers. Realistically, we can’t stop anyone with the code from posting it publicly — that’s just how MIT works. But if a Radicle repo shows up in public, we’ll ask the customer to make it private. If they don’t, we revoke their access to the repo and future updates.

## Questions

Happy to talk through any of this — drop questions in this thread, a DM, or on the PR.