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8.1. License

What license is this course under?

A dual license, because the repository holds two different kinds of work:

  • The course content (docs/, except the license text itself) is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0), in docs/LICENSE.txt.
  • The software is licensed under the MIT License, in the root LICENSE. That root grant covers the agent, clients, infrastructure, load tests, scripts, workflows, and configuration; matching copies remain beside the independently reusable component trees.

Both grants allow use, adaptation, redistribution, and commercial reuse. CC BY requires attribution; MIT requires preservation of its copyright and permission notice.

Why two licenses instead of one?

Because prose and software are best served by different, purpose-built licenses:

  • Creative Commons licenses are written for creative and educational works — articles, courses, diagrams, datasets. CC-BY-4.0 is the natural fit for the chapters you are reading.
  • Software licenses like MIT are written for source code — they speak in terms of "the Software", warranties, and liability, which is what you want around the agent and the manifests.

Splitting them keeps each grant clean: reusing a paragraph of the course and forking the agent have clear, separate rules, and neither accidentally imposes the other's terms.

What is an open-source license, briefly?

A license is the legal permission that lets other people use your work. Without one, default copyright reserves all rights, and nobody may legally copy or modify what you publish — even on a public GitHub repo. Open licenses grant those permissions up front. They fall into two broad families:

  • Permissive (e.g., MIT, Apache-2.0): do almost anything, including using the work in closed-source or commercial products, as long as you preserve the copyright and license notice.
  • Copyleft (e.g., GPLv3): the same freedoms, but any derivative you distribute must be released under the same license, keeping it open.

For creative works, Creative Commons plays the same role: CC-BY is the permissive option (attribution only); variants add conditions like NC (non-commercial) or SA (share-alike). This course deliberately chose the most permissive options — MIT and CC-BY — so the material spreads with as little friction as possible.

What can I do with the content and the code?

Under CC-BY-4.0 (the course content) you may share and adapt the material — including for commercial use — provided you give credit, link the license, and note any changes.

Under MIT (the code) you may use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell the software, provided you keep the copyright and permission notice. Both come "as is", with no warranty.

How do I attribute it?

Both licenses require you to preserve their notice, and CC BY additionally requires attribution. Keep it simple and visible:

  • Reusing course content (CC-BY-4.0) — credit the author and source, link the license, and indicate if you changed anything. For example:

Adapted from the AgentOps Open Course by Médéric Hurier (MLOps Courses), licensed under CC-BY-4.0. Changes were made.

  • Reusing code (MIT) — keep the LICENSE file (or its copyright line and permission notice) in your copy or derivative:

Copyright (c) 2026 Médéric HURIER (MLOps Courses)

That is the whole obligation. You do not need to ask permission, pay a fee, or open-source your own project.

How does the repository prevent license drift?

mise run check:licenses is a machine-verifiable gate. It confirms the repository's license layout, inventories all three locked Python environments, rejects dependency licenses outside the approved open-source families, and verifies the embedded license text for packages whose metadata reports UNKNOWN.

mise run secure complements that policy with Trivy's dependency, secret, misconfiguration, and license scanners plus a full-history gitleaks scan. License findings have their own UNKNOWN/HIGH/CRITICAL gate. The policy explicitly accepts the GPL/LGPL identifiers used by the Wolfi/Python runtime and the small set of valid SPDX expressions, legacy metadata labels, or public-domain grants that Trivy leaves unclassified. Trivy still rejects non-commercial and every other unreviewed high-risk or unknown term. The container scan and release workflows apply the same policy to both built images before accepting or publishing them. A scanner is evidence, not a legal opinion: review any new dependency and its upstream license before adding it.

What license should my own agent use?

When you turn the reference agent into your own project (see 8.3. Templates), pick the license that matches your goal:

  • Want the widest possible reuse with minimal strings? Use MIT, as this repository's code does.
  • Need an explicit patent grant for contributors? Use Apache-2.0.
  • Want derivatives to stay open? Use a copyleft license like GPLv3.

Use choosealicense.com to decide, then drop the full, unmodified license text into a LICENSE file at your repo root. And remember your project is a derivative work of its dependencies: check that their licenses are compatible with the one you pick.

How do I cite this course?

The repository ships CITATION.cff, a machine-readable citation file understood by GitHub and reference managers such as Zotero. It describes the repository's software artifact and therefore records MIT; this page and docs/LICENSE.txt carry the file-scoped CC-BY-4.0 grant for the chapters. On GitHub, open the repository's Cite this repository menu to export the current metadata.

Citation and licensing solve different problems: the CFF file gives readers a consistent scholarly reference, while CC-BY-4.0 and MIT define the legal permissions and attribution obligations for reuse.