License & trademark

Apache License 2.0

Meridian NIP is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. The full legal text lives in the LICENSE file at the repo root. This page is the plain-English version.

What you can do

• Run Meridian in production for any purpose — personal lab, home network, corporate intranet, paid consulting work, anything.
• Modify the source for your own needs.
• Distribute modified versions, including commercially, provided you:
  • Include the LICENSE in the distribution
  • Note any changes you made to files
  • Preserve copyright + attribution notices (see NOTICE)
  • Use a name and logo that aren't "MeridianNIP" (see trademark section below)
• Receive a perpetual patent license from every contributor for the patent claims their contributions actually use. This is the main reason Apache 2.0 is enterprise-friendly: corp legal teams know they can't be patent-trolled later by the same people who contributed code.

What you cannot do

• Use the "MeridianNIP" name or logo on your fork or derivative (trademark, separate from license — see below).
• Sue MeridianNIP or other contributors over patents in this code and keep using it — that automatically terminates your license (LICENSE Section 3).
• Hold the contributors liable for damages from running the software (LICENSE Section 8).

Trademark — "MeridianNIP"

Apache 2.0 grants a copyright + patent license. It explicitly does not grant rights to use the licensor's trademarks (LICENSE Section 6). For Meridian, that matters in one specific way:

• The product name MeridianNIP is a trademark.
• The MeridianNIP logo (the green-on-dark "M" badge you see across the site) is a trademark.
• If you fork this codebase and ship your own distribution, your distribution must use a different name and a different logo. Pick one — there are plenty of good ones available.
• You can absolutely run the original MeridianNIP build internally and tell people you use MeridianNIP. That's nominative fair use, not branding your derivative.
• You can also strip the "Powered by MeridianNIP" footer on your own deployment via Admin → Branding. That's allowed because it's your deployment, not a re-branded distribution.

Why this carve-out exists

Permissive OSS licenses without trademark protection lead to a pattern where some vendor takes the code, makes minimal changes, charges money under the original name, and degrades the brand for everyone who recognises it. Apache 2.0 Section 6 + a trademark are the standard pair of tools to prevent that without restricting actual code reuse. See: PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Apache Cassandra, etc. — same pattern.

Third-party components

Meridian uses a number of upstream open-source libraries (Python packages declared in requirements.txt / pyproject.toml, system packages installed by install.sh). Each carries its own license; the NOTICE file at the repo root + the SBOM emitted by Admin → System Health → OSS components enumerate them.