Weft
Copyright (c) 2026 Adam Krysztopa

This product is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file at the root
of this repository.

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Original work
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**Weft carries no third party's source text.** Every line of this project's own
code is written for it, against its own contracts. Nothing here depends on a
licence granted by anyone else.

That is a rule, not a description: no file may be copied or adapted from another
project's source, and no third-party source text may be pasted into this
repository. Where a prior system informed a design, what was carried across is
understanding — an approach, an ordering, a measurement, a reason a guard exists
— restated in this project's own words and implemented fresh. Copyright does not
reach any of that.

What was learned from prior work, and what was deliberately not taken, is a
design record kept outside version control. Nothing in it authorises a copy of a
third party's text, because that is not permitted here at all.

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Three cases, because the sentence above used to be absolute and was not accurate
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This section was added on 2026-09-05. It previously read "Weft contains no source
text from any other codebase", and two separate things made that literally false
while nothing about the project's substance had changed. Both are stated here
rather than left for a reader to discover, because a founding claim that is
almost true is worse than a narrower one that is exactly true.

1. **A third party's code — never.** Somebody else's work is somebody else's:
   not a file, a function body, a docstring, a comment, a prompt string, a word
   list or a test fixture. Read to understand, then closed. This is the rule
   above and it has not moved.

2. **The copyright holder's own prior work — permitted, and marked.** Material
   written by this project's own author before this project began carries no
   third party's rights. Copying it violates nobody's licence, and forbidding it
   would be a rule about tidiness dressed as a rule about ownership. Where such
   material is carried across, the file carrying it says so, naming the source
   work — so a reader can always tell the two origins apart without asking.

   **How it says so, because "says so" was a sentence and not a convention until
   2026-09-09.** The carried lines are delimited in place, by a comment in
   whatever syntax the file is written in: `weft-prior-work begin: <source work>`
   opens the span and names the source work it came from, and
   `weft-prior-work end` closes it and takes no argument. Spans do not nest — a
   span inside a span makes *which lines are that work* answerable two ways,
   which is the one question this convention exists to answer. Every source work
   carried this way is enumerated on the repository's own README.md, where a
   reader looks first, and tests/architecture/test_release_licensing.py fails
   the build when the marked spans and that enumeration disagree. The obligation
   falls in the same commit as the copied line and never after it, which is why
   the check exists before the first copy rather than behind it.

3. **Short attributed quotation of a stated rationale — permitted, and bounded.**
   A handful of docstrings in this repository quote a sentence of a third party's
   *reasoning* — why one cleaning stage must run before another — attributed with
   a path and a line number, immediately beside this project's own restatement of
   the same reasoning. Nothing executable was ever carried this way: no
   expression, no algorithm, no data. This is ordinary attributed quotation of a
   published rationale, of the kind a comment citing a paper makes, and the
   previous absolute wording forbade it in words while the repository practised
   it. It is bounded rather than open: a quotation must be a sentence or two, it
   must be attributed at the point of use, and it must sit next to the project's
   own words on the same point — never stand in for them.

The distinction that matters, and it is the same test the rest of this project
uses: **if you could not have written it without the other file open, it is a
copy.** Case 1 forbids that outright. Case 2 permits it because the other file is
the author's own. Case 3 is not that at all — it is quoting someone, with their
name on it, beside your own argument.
