Political statement

LouiseLM is an anti-capitalist project. Its purpose is to give people more control over the systems that turn their attention, judgment, and ideas into software. It favors tools that are local-first, legible, and owned by their operator over services that make productive work dependent on a vendor.

This statement is not a licence or a condition of use. It does not add to or narrow the legal permissions granted with LouiseLM. The licence stands on its own; this document explains the position behind choosing it.

Reach is the mechanism¶

LouiseLM uses a permissive licence because its effect depends on reach. A software harness matters politically when it is available everywhere and shapes ordinary work: when people can inspect it, change it, run it on their own machines, and decide which agents and services enter their workflow. Friction works against that aim.

The licence therefore carries no political test. People and organizations do not have to agree with this statement to use the code. Every installation that moves control from a proprietary service toward its operator is a small decommodification of the means of producing software. Making that move easy is more valuable here than using copyright to select acceptable users.

What remains reserved¶

A permissive copyright licence is not a surrender of every instrument. The LouiseLM name and associated marks remain reserved. The licence contains no explicit patent grant. The maintainer also retains the ability to release future versions under different terms — narrower, source-available, or otherwise — if the maintainer’s incentives change or the project changes hands. Versions already distributed keep the rights their licence granted; that grant does not reach forward to versions not yet released.

Those choices are deliberate. Trademark is the instrument available now for deciding who may present themselves as LouiseLM. Patent rights, where they exist, are one of the few instruments capable of reaching an independent reimplementation rather than only copied source. Neither belongs silently inside a promise made for the sake of distribution.

No permission to use the LouiseLM marks will be granted to entities deriving a majority of their revenue from proprietary foundation models, or from the hardware those models run on. That refusal applies to the name, not the code. Such entities receive the same permissions under the software licence as anyone else, but they may not present a fork, product, or service as LouiseLM. The structural definition is intentional: it states a class position that survives company renames, subsidiaries, and changes in the market.

Community after code scarcity¶

Open-source communities have often formed because people needed one another’s code. AI is reducing that dependence: implementation that once required a group can increasingly be produced by one person working with agents. That does not make other people unnecessary. It changes what is scarce.

The contributions LouiseLM needs most are workflows, evidence, criticism, and judgment: accounts of where attention was preserved or wasted, reproducible failures, better boundaries, and decisions that withstand use. The current contribution policy reflects that change. Outside code may be studied as a proposal, but the maintainer decides what enters the project and reimplements accepted ideas. Community here forms around shared decisions and demonstrated outcomes, not around accumulating patches.

The limit of a licence¶

No licence ends exploitation, prevents appropriation, or guarantees that a tool will be used for emancipatory ends. MIT permits commercial use, including use by organizations opposed to this project’s politics. That is the cost of choosing ubiquity as the immediate mechanism.

A licence can influence whether a tool spreads, who may capture value from it, and which leverage its author keeps. It cannot substitute for ownership, organization, or political action. LouiseLM keeps the name, any patent leverage that may exist, and control over future releases while making the present code easy to adopt. Claiming that this arrangement achieves more would be flattery; pretending it is politically neutral would be dishonest.

Reserving these instruments concentrates them in one person, which cuts both ways. It keeps them out of a fork’s hands without that fork paying for them; it does not keep them out of a buyer’s hands if the maintainer chooses to sell. No text here, in the trademark policy, or in the code licence binds that choice — the reserved name, patent leverage, and future-release control are exactly what a buyer would be purchasing, and their transfer would carry no obligation to this statement’s politics. That is not a gap closable by better wording; it is the shape of holding these instruments personally rather than not holding them at all.