The licence is AGPL-3.0-or-later

Context

The tool is to be open source, and nobody is to be able to freely make money from it. Those two requirements conflict as stated: the Open Source Definition forbids discriminating against commercial use by name, so a licence that prevents selling is not an open source licence. The tool is meant to live inside company repositories and scaffold their continuous integration, so a licence that a company's policy refuses defeats its purpose. It is a program that is run, not a library that is linked, so a copyleft obligation lands on someone redistributing a modified tool and on nobody merely using it.

Decision

The licence is the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later. Anyone may use the tool commercially. Anyone who redistributes a modified version, or runs one as a network service, must publish their source under the same terms. The copyright is held by one party, so that a commercial exemption could be sold alongside the copyleft. The LICENSE that archdoc init --license=mit writes into a scaffolded repository covers that repository's documents and has no bearing on this.

Alternatives

• Plain GPL-3.0. It leaves open the one route that matters, a hosted specification-management service built on a private fork, because its obligations attach to distribution and a service distributes nothing. Section 13 of the AGPL closes that route, and binds only someone offering a modified version over a network, which a locally run command never does.
• A source-available licence: BUSL, FSL or PolyForm. Each forbids commercial use outright, which is closer to the literal requirement, but none is an open source licence and each is one that corporate policy commonly blocks.

Consequences

Easier:

• The tool is open source under the definition, so no policy that admits open source software refuses it.
• Nobody can take a modified tool closed and sell it, or offer one as a service without publishing the source.

Harder:

• Commercial use is permitted, not prevented. Someone charging to set the tool up, or using it inside a business, owes nothing.

Constrained:

• Accepting a contribution without a licence agreement ends the possibility of selling a commercial exemption, because the copyright would no longer be held by one party.
• The licence text ships in every release archive, as the AGPL requires of a distributor.

Sources

• docs/DECISIONS.md at 9654fe2d, section Licence, records the requirement, the conflict with the Open Source Definition, the choice of Affero over plain GPL, the rejection of source-available licences, and the single copyright holder. This sets created and decided.
• LICENSE at 9654fe2l is the licence text as adopted.
• The decision was taken in a design session on 2026-09-13, not publicly available, and first written down the same day.