Relicense as AGPL-3.0-only and ship the terms with the build

.github/workflows/release.yml

@@ -109,13 +109,13 @@ jobs:
           mkdir -p "dist/${ROOT}"
           if [ "${{ matrix.os_name }}" = "windows" ]; then
             cp "target/${{ matrix.target }}/release/vn-ranger.exe" "dist/${ROOT}/"
-            cp README.md LICENSE "dist/${ROOT}/"
+            cp README.md LICENSE THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md "dist/${ROOT}/"
             # bsdtar writes forward-slash entries; the GNU tar in Git Bash does not
             # make a zip at all, so the Windows bsdtar is called explicitly.
             "/c/Windows/System32/tar.exe" -a -c -f "dist/${NAME}.zip" -C dist "${ROOT}"
           else
             cp "target/${{ matrix.target }}/release/vn-ranger" "dist/${ROOT}/"
-            cp README.md LICENSE "dist/${ROOT}/"
+            cp README.md LICENSE THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md "dist/${ROOT}/"
             (cd dist && tar -czf "${NAME}.tar.gz" "${ROOT}")
           fi
           cp "dist/${NAME}.${{ matrix.ext }}" .

AGENTS.md

@@ -312,6 +312,14 @@ one contract:
 
 Every new dependency is a licence, a supply chain and a size decision.
 
+**This section is about other people's crates, not about this repository's licence.** The
+project is AGPL-3.0-only (`LICENSE`), and a permissively licensed dependency is exactly
+what that licence expects: copyleft reaches the work, not its dependencies. What would
+break the arrangement is a dependency whose terms are stricter than the ones this tree
+offers, or one whose licence nobody can state —
+[`THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md`](THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md) is the page that says, for every crate
+the build resolves, which terms apply.
+
 - Allowed: MIT, Apache-2.0 (including the LLVM exception), BSD-2-Clause,
   BSD-3-Clause, ISC, Zlib, Unicode-3.0, MPL-2.0 (file-level, unmodified), and
   public-domain dedications for `notify` (CC0-1.0) and `ksni` (Unlicense) alone: no

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -4,6 +4,25 @@ All notable changes to vn-ranger are recorded here. The format follows
 [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.1.0/), and the project follows
 [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0.html).
 
+## [Unreleased]
+
+### Changed
+
+- **The licence is AGPL-3.0-only, not MIT.** [`LICENSE`](LICENSE) is now the verbatim GNU
+  Affero General Public License version 3, and `Cargo.toml` says `license = "AGPL-3.0-only"`
+  so a crate built from this tree does not claim otherwise. The ranger is copyleft: it may
+  be run, studied, changed and shared, and a version distributed or offered over a network
+  has to carry its source under the same terms. A commercial exception remains available on
+  request, which is what the new contributor licence agreement in
+  [`CONTRIBUTING.md`](CONTRIBUTING.md) exists to keep possible.
+- **[`THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md`](THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md)** now names every one of the 561
+  crates `Cargo.lock` resolves, the licence each keeps, and the typefaces embedded in the
+  binary. No third-party term is relicensed by the AGPL, and the notices travel in the
+  release archive (`docs/RELEASES.md` §2).
+- `README.md` ends in **Security & license** rather than a one-line licence note: the
+  copyleft, the commercial exception, the security policy and the deep-dive document, in
+  the order a person deciding whether to trust the program wants them.
+
 ## [0.1.7] - 2026-10-20
 
 The release that stops treating a file, a log, a connection and an agent as opaque. Its

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,179 @@
+# Contributing to vn-ranger
+
+vn-ranger is a local-only system ranger: it inventories what runs on a machine, explains
+what is unusual, remembers a baseline, and — carefully, and only through one typed action
+path — quarantines and cleans. It is Rust and egui, it opens no socket that talks to the
+network, and it does not hide.
+
+Contributions are welcome, including a bug report with no patch attached. This document
+says how a change gets in, and what it has to prove first.
+
+## 1. Read two documents before you write code
+
+| Document | Why |
+|---|---|
+| [AGENTS.md](AGENTS.md) | The contract. §2 is the golden rules: never crash, never lie, never delete, never phone home, never hide. A patch that breaks one of them is rejected on principle, not on style |
+| [docs/PLAN.md](docs/PLAN.md) | The research and the scope. It is long; §1 is the short version, §4 the principles, §13 what is done with a machine's data |
+
+`docs/PLAN-0.1.7.md`, `docs/NEXT.md` and `docs/RULES.md` are the release this tree cut, the
+work order, and the closed vocabulary a rule may use. `SECURITY.md` is the promise to the
+person running the program, and a change that quietly weakens one of its rows is a defect.
+
+## 2. The contributor licence agreement
+
+The project is **AGPL-3.0-only** ([LICENSE](LICENSE)), and it also offers a **commercial
+exception on request**. Both remain possible only if the project holds enough rights in
+every contribution to license it again. That is what this agreement buys, and it is why it
+is a condition of merge rather than a courtesy.
+
+By opening a pull request and stating in its description that you agree to this section,
+you agree, for the contribution in that pull request, that:
+
+1. **The work is yours to give.** You hold the copyright, or you have the copyright
+   holder's permission — an employer's, typically — to make this agreement. If your
+   employer holds the rights in work you do, say so in the pull request and, if asked,
+   provide a letter from them.
+2. **You grant a licence, not the copyright.** You grant vecnode a perpetual, worldwide,
+   non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright licence to reproduce, prepare
+   derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense and distribute your
+   contribution and works derived from it, under any licence terms — including the
+   AGPL-3.0-only everyone else receives it under, and a commercial licence — and to
+   relicense it on those terms. You keep your copyright, and you may use your own
+   contribution anywhere else.
+3. **Patents come with it.** You grant vecnode and every recipient of the software a
+   perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable patent licence to make,
+   use, sell, offer to sell, import and otherwise transfer your contribution, limited to
+   the claims you own or control that the contribution necessarily infringes.
+4. **There is nothing hidden in it.** To your knowledge the contribution carries no third
+   party's copyright, patent or licence term that would prevent the grants above. If part
+   of it is not entirely yours, name that part and its licence at the top of the pull
+   request, and add it to [THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md](THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md).
+5. **No warranty.** You provide the contribution as it is, without warranty of any kind,
+   and you are not liable for the project's use of it.
+6. **It is public from the moment you send it.** The contribution is not confidential.
+   It lives in the pull request and then in the repository history.
+
+If a clause is unenforceable where you are, the rest stand. This is not an assignment of
+copyright; it is a licence, and it survives a change of maintainer. It cannot be withdrawn
+for work already merged, which is what makes it a licence record rather than a promise.
+
+**How to agree.** Put this line in the pull request description, with your name and the
+address you want the record kept under:
+
+```text
+CLA: I have read CONTRIBUTING.md and I agree to the contributor licence agreement.
+```
+
+The pull request is the record: public, dated, permanent. A pull request without that line
+is not merged — not as a slight, but because merging it would make the project's licence
+claim about that file a claim it cannot keep.
+
+**If you cannot agree to it,** an issue that describes a defect is still worth a great deal
+and needs no agreement at all. So does a review, a reproduction, or a corrected sentence in
+these documents.
+
+## 3. What a change has to prove
+
+`AGENTS.md` §10 is the full definition of done. Distilled:
+
+- **The behaviour has a test, and the test fails without the change.** A test that passes
+  before the patch proves nothing.
+- **A parser has a fixture, and the fixture is sanitised.** No real username, hostname or
+  path from a real machine; `crates/native/fixtures/` is the precedent.
+- **A rule has a positive and a negative case, and a benign explanation.** A rule that
+  cannot say what the innocent version of the fact looks like does not ship — that is
+  §7 of `AGENTS.md`, and it is the rule that keeps a finding from becoming a verdict.
+- **No `unwrap`, `expect`, `panic!`, `todo!` or `unimplemented!` outside a test.** The
+  workspace denies them; a missing API, a truncated file or a process that exits mid-read
+  is an outcome a person can act on, never a crash.
+- **No `unsafe`.** It is forbidden at workspace level. A platform call belongs behind a
+  safe crate, or the feature waits.
+- **No new dependency without §8.** Every crate is a licence, a supply chain and a size
+  decision, and a GPL, AGPL or LGPL dependency is refused. Say in the pull request what the
+  crate bought.
+- **No network.** `cargo xtask ci` bans the network crates by name and greps the tree for a
+  socket. v0.x is offline by design, and that is a product feature rather than an
+  implementation detail.
+- **The documents and the interface still tell the truth.** If a promise in `SECURITY.md`,
+  `docs/PLAN.md` or the interface language stops being true, it changes in the same pull
+  request. `cargo xtask language` is the check for the interface half of that sentence.
+- **`cargo xtask ci` is green**, including the cross-target clippy where it can run.
+
+## 4. The one path that needs a second reviewer
+
+`crates/native/src/action.rs`, `quarantine.rs` and `clean.rs` are the only code that can
+destroy data. A change there needs two reviewers, and the second writes the traversal table
+from the specification without reading the first one's tests — so that two people have
+independently asked "can this leave its root?" and got the same answer.
+
+The order in that path is fixed and is not a style preference: **journal, then act, then
+result**. A destructive verb is named by an id, never by a path, and is resolved through an
+already-open `cap_std::fs::Dir`. Links, hard links, a file whose identity changed since it
+was inspected, and anything outside the root are refused with a reason. Present a pull
+request that removes one of those refusals and it will be rejected whatever else it fixes.
+
+## 5. Building and checking
+
+```bash
+cargo run --release       # the ranger
+cargo xtask ci            # everything CI runs, in the order CI runs it
+cargo xtask test          # tests alone
+cargo xtask lint          # clippy alone
+```
+
+`ci` is `fmt --check`, the no-network audit, the language audit, pack validation, the
+coverage table in `docs/RULES.md`, the signature test, the "no content engine in the
+default build" check, clippy with warnings denied, and then the tests.
+
+The first build is the slow one: egui, wgpu and winit are most of the tree. After that,
+`cargo xtask ci` is the loop, and it is exactly what CI runs — there is no separate CI
+recipe to discover.
+
+Three platforms are built in CI, and two of them will disagree with your machine. If your
+change contains a `#[cfg]`, hold it to a target you are not on; `AGENTS.md` §5 has the
+command and the reason an attribute on a statement deletes it elsewhere.
+
+## 6. Commits and pull requests
+
+- A commit subject is imperative and capitalised: *Say what an executable is*, not
+  *Fixed the executable thing*.
+- The body says **why**, because the diff already says what. A comment in the code follows
+  the same rule.
+- One concern per pull request. A licence change, a refactor and a bug fix are three.
+- Say what you verified, and say what you did not. "Tested on Windows 11 only" is a useful
+  sentence; silence reads as "tested everywhere".
+- A dependency change is its own pull request, with the licence, the size and the reason.
+
+## 7. Reporting a defect
+
+- A **defect** is a GitHub issue: what you expected, what happened, the version, the
+  platform, and the smallest sequence that reproduces it.
+- A **vulnerability** is not an issue. Use
+  [SECURITY.md](SECURITY.md) and GitHub's private reporting. Do not open a public thread,
+  and do not attach a live sample to one.
+- A **false positive** is a security defect in this product, not a cost of doing business.
+  Report it with the evidence the interface showed and the benign explanation it missed.
+
+## 8. Style
+
+British spelling in prose and identifiers — `colour`, `behaviour`, `licence` as a noun —
+and `color` only where it is a field name a person might type. A doc comment on every
+public item. A named constant over a literal, and a named type over a tuple. A long
+function that is a sequence of interface statements is fine; a long function that is a
+tangle of decisions is not.
+
+## 9. Licence of what you add
+
+- Everything you add is distributed under **AGPL-3.0-only**. There is no per-file header to
+  copy; `LICENSE` at the root covers the tree, and a header duplicated 400 times goes stale
+  the first time it is edited.
+- **Do not paste code from another project** unless its licence permits it here and you
+  name it in [THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md](THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md). The default answer is no: a
+  copied file is a licence this repository cannot relicense, which is the same reason
+  `AGENTS.md` §8 refuses a copyleft crate.
+- Reading a **documented format** is not copying code. The ClamAV signature readers
+  (`.hdb`, `.hsb`, `.ndb`) are the standing example: the format is implemented here from
+  its documentation, no ClamAV source is in the tree, and the notices say exactly that.
+- A **new dependency** changes the notices, so `cargo metadata --format-version 1` and the
+  regeneration described in [THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md](THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md) belong in the
+  same pull request. A stale notices page is a licence claim that is no longer true.

Cargo.toml

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ members = ["crates/*", "apps/*", "xtask"]
 [workspace.package]
 version = "0.1.7"
 edition = "2024"
-license = "MIT"
+license = "AGPL-3.0-only"
 rust-version = "1.95"
 repository = "https://github.com/vecnode/vn-ranger"
 homepage = "https://github.com/vecnode/vn-ranger"