# PDR 002: Keep shared improvements open

- HTML version: https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-knowledge-graph/pdrs/002-keep-shared-improvements-open
- Project: Personal Knowledge Graph
- Status: Accepted
- Opened: 2026-01-11
- Decided: 2026-01-11

## Context

The public repository originally had no license. Readers could inspect it, but
they had no clear right to contribute, fork it, or build on it. A permissive
license would allow a hosted proprietary fork to use the work without sharing
its changes. Refusing contributions would avoid ownership questions but would
conflict with the decision to build in public.

External contributions also needed clear terms. The project needed one
licensing policy that covered the original code and accepted contributions.

## Decision

License the public project under AGPL-3.0. Modifications offered over a network
must make their corresponding source available under the same terms.

Require contributors to grant a Contributor License Agreement before their
changes merge so the same licensing policy can cover the combined work. The
agreement gives the project owner broader rights than the public license does.
It does not decide a future product model. Dual licensing, open core, or a
closed edition would require a separate public product decision before any
such change.

## Consequences

People may inspect, run, modify, and contribute to the project under explicit
terms. Hosted derivatives cannot keep their modifications closed merely
because users access them over a network.

AGPL and the contributor agreement may deter corporate contributors. The
agreement also adds a step to a contributor's first pull request. More
importantly, its broader grant creates an imbalance between the owner and
contributors. The published policy and decision history need to make that
imbalance visible rather than presenting a future proprietary edition as an
already accepted outcome.

## Evaluation

Every merged contribution must have a recorded agreement. Revisit the policy
before seeking outside contributions, or if the license prevents a dependency
or collaboration that matters more than the network-copyleft guarantee. Any
business model that needs different licensing requires a new PDR and cannot
rely on this record as prior approval.

## Migration note

This record extracts the licensing and contributor policy from ADR 037 without
changing its 2026-01-11 date or status. The original ADR cited relicensing and
open-core optionality. This migration records that legal capability as a
consequence of the agreement, not as an approved product direction. ADR 037
now retains the technical choice to enforce the contributor agreement in pull
requests.

## Related records

- Project: [Personal Knowledge Graph](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-knowledge-graph.md)
- Implemented by ADR: [ADR 037: Contributor Agreement Enforcement](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-knowledge-graph/adrs/037-agpl-license.md)

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