Legal & Licensing

MetaLoom itself is open source under the Apache License 2.0. What you may do with a running MetaLoom deployment, however, is not decided by the platform license alone: the pipeline nodes call out to third-party model weights, and those weights carry their own licenses. A handful of them forbid commercial use outright.

This section collects everything you need to answer two questions before you deploy:

Which models does my pipeline actually pull in, and what am I allowed to do with them?
How was the MetaLoom source code produced, and where was AI code generation involved?

MetaLoom is Apache License 2.0

The entire platform — the Loom server, the Cortex engine, every built-in node, the UI, the clients, the CLI and this website — is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Commercial use, modification, distribution, patent grant and private use are all permitted. The full text ships as LICENSE.txt in the repository root.

What Apache-2.0 gives you What it covers Where it stops: model weights Full license text

Model Licenses

Every model, runtime and native library a MetaLoom node can pull in, mapped to its license and whether it is cleared for commercial use — including the ones that are not.

Non-commercial models Per-node inventory Runtimes & libraries A clean commercial stack

AI Code Generation Disclosure

How MetaLoom was built. From 2023 through 2025 the code was written entirely by hand; in 2026 AI-assisted code generation was introduced. This page states exactly what changed and what did not.

Timeline What AI is used for Review & ownership Licensing impact

The Platform License — Apache 2.0

MetaLoom is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. One license, one copy, no dual-licensed "community edition": the full text ships as LICENSE.txt in the repository root and is the same license that applies to every artifact and container image published from that source.

Apache-2.0 is a permissive license. In practical terms:

You may Conditions

You may	Conditions
Use it commercially — run MetaLoom in production, sell a service built on it, embed it in a product	Keep the license and copyright notices in copies of the source you distribute
Modify it — patch, extend, fork, write your own nodes	State significant changes you made to modified files you distribute
Distribute it — ship the source or the binaries, alone or as part of something larger	Include a copy of the license, and the `NOTICE` file if one is present
Use it privately — deploy internally with no obligation to publish anything	None
Rely on the patent grant — contributors grant a licence to their patent claims in their contributions	The grant terminates for anyone who initiates patent litigation over the software

Use it commercially — run MetaLoom in production, sell a service built on it, embed it in a product

Keep the license and copyright notices in copies of the source you distribute

Modify it — patch, extend, fork, write your own nodes

State significant changes you made to modified files you distribute

Distribute it — ship the source or the binaries, alone or as part of something larger

Include a copy of the license, and the NOTICE file if one is present

Use it privately — deploy internally with no obligation to publish anything

None

Rely on the patent grant — contributors grant a licence to their patent claims in their contributions

The grant terminates for anyone who initiates patent litigation over the software

You do not have to open-source your own code to use MetaLoom, publish your pipeline definitions, give attribution in a user interface, or pay a fee at any deployment size.

What the License Covers

Everything produced from the MetaLoom repository:

the Loom server, its REST, GraphQL and WebSocket APIs, and the Loom UI;
the Cortex engine, the node runtime and every built-in node;
the Java client, the metaloom command line client and the published Maven artifacts;
the container images built from that source;
the examples — including the Python worker the custom node playbook starts from — and this documentation website.

Contributions are accepted under the same license: submitting a change means offering it under Apache-2.0, as section 5 of the license describes.

Where the License Stops

Important

The platform license does not travel to the model weights. MetaLoom ships no model weights. Nodes reference models by path, repository id or endpoint URL, and you supply them. The license that governs a model is the one on that model’s card — not Apache-2.0.

The same boundary applies to the third-party runtimes a node calls into — OpenCV, Tesseract, whisper.cpp, InspireFace and the model services you point nodes at. They carry their own terms, and a few of them are stricter than Apache-2.0. The Model Licenses page inventories each one.

Read This First If You Are Going Commercial

Two things in the catalogue are hard blockers for a commercial deployment:

the InspireFace model packs used by the Face Detection node, and
Ideogram 4.0, the backing model of the planned imagegen node.

Both are covered in detail under Models restricted to non-commercial use, together with the swaps and workarounds that exist. Everything else in the default catalogue is either permissively licensed or carries conditions you can meet.

Not Legal Advice

These pages are an engineering inventory maintained alongside the code, not a legal opinion. Model licenses change between releases, and a checkpoint’s terms can differ from the terms of the architecture it is based on. Before you ship, verify the license on the model card of the exact revision you deploy, and involve your own counsel where the answer matters.