Entropic — local-first agentic inference engine
Copyright (C) 2026 Tristan VanFossen

Entropic is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License,
version 3 or (at your option) any later version, with the linking
exception described below. The full text of the LGPL is in the
LICENSE file alongside this notice.

This NOTICE documents the project's provenance, the linking
exception granted under LGPL-3.0 section 7, the project's licensing
history, and third-party attribution.

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PROVENANCE
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Entropic was authored by Tristan VanFossen, who retains copyright
in the work. The engine drew on patterns and lessons from prior
personal projects developed outside working hours on personal
hardware. Public predecessors include:

  - github.com/tvanfossen/local-llm-mcp
    (created 2025-08-27; described upstream as a predecessor to
    Entropic; an early experiment with local-LLM agent orchestration)

  - github.com/tvanfossen/pathfinder-society-scribe
    (created 2025-08-17; a Discord bot using local LLM models with
    BDD-validated behavioral flows)

The author has continued development of Entropic during employment
at BISSELL Homecare Inc., applying it to corporate-use scenarios
alongside ongoing personal-project use. The licensing structure
below is intended to give both contexts unambiguous, on-record
terms of use.

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BISSELL HOMECARE INC. LINKING EXCEPTION
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As an additional permission under LGPL-3.0 section 7, the copyright
holder grants every licensee of Entropic the following:

    Linking this library, statically or dynamically, with
    independent modules to produce an executable or other combined
    work does not by itself cause that combined work to be governed
    by the GNU Lesser General Public License. Such independent
    modules — and the combination of this library with them — are
    a "Combined Work" within the meaning of LGPL-3.0 section 4. The
    requirements of section 4d (delivery of source for the Library
    portion in re-linkable form, or use of a suitable shared library
    mechanism) apply only to portions of the Combined Work that are
    derived from this library.

In plain terms: applications that link librentropic.so — statically
or dynamically — are not themselves required to be licensed under
the LGPL. Only modifications to the Entropic library itself remain
subject to LGPL section 4d.

The exception is named for BISSELL Homecare Inc. in recognition of
the working relationship under which much of Entropic's recent
development has occurred. The grant runs to every licensee of
Entropic; it is not exclusive to BISSELL. This is the only
additional permission attached to the project.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author wishes to acknowledge BISSELL Homecare Inc. as the
employment context in which significant portions of Entropic have
been developed and refined. The Linking Exception above is offered
in good faith, in recognition of that ongoing relationship, and
ensures BISSELL has unrestricted permissive use of the engine
alongside every other licensee.

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VERSION HISTORY
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Versions of Entropic prior to 2.0.0 were released under the Apache
License, Version 2.0. The license change to LGPL-3.0-or-later (with
the BISSELL Homecare Inc. Linking Exception) applies to version
2.0.0 and all subsequent releases. If you obtained this software
under Apache-2.0 (v1.x), that license continues to apply to the
version you received; the re-licensing is not retroactive.

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THIRD-PARTY COMPONENTS
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Entropic bundles or links against third-party software with their
own licenses. See the upstream projects for full attribution text:

  - llama.cpp           MIT
  - nlohmann::json      MIT
  - spdlog              MIT
  - sqlite3             Public domain
  - rapidyaml (ryml)    MIT
  - cpp-httplib         MIT (examples/openai-server only)
