Legal guidelines

The Max engine is a free and open source library dual-licensed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses. The following section goes over basic things to have in mind to not breach those licenses.

Using libraries

Max can depend on other free and open source libraries, but they must be licensed under compatible licenses, for example: MIT, Apache2.0, Zlib, BSD, X11 and Public domain.

Max can however not depend on less permissive licenses such as any GNU license, the Mozilla Public License and any proprietary license. Before considering a library, check if it's compatible with these terms.

Copying code

Besides using libraries, other people's code can also be used in Max as long as the licenses are followed. If you re-use some code that was written outside of the Max repository, you must follow that code's license, which may mean to add a comment or similar indicating the origin and the author. This takes for granted that the licenses are compatible, just like with library usage.

If you aren't strictly copying code but otherwise gathering ideas on how to solve a problem, you shouldn't need to do this. Although it's recommended you don't do this with leaked proprietary codebases, as it could still land us in trouble.

LLMs

Adding LLM-generated code to Max is strictly forbidden. LLMs have been trained with lots of data without permission, which causes them to spit out code that's licensed without citing the sources.

You may use LLMs as a rubber ducky, for debugging, or help you understand how something works, but you can't paste code generated by an LLM into the Max codebase.