What we inherited, from whom, and under which licence

How we credit what we did not write.

The convention on this site is simple and it is applied everywhere. Where a mechanism is inherited from upstream, it is described as inherited. It is never presented as authored here.

That has a practical consequence for how you read the rest of the site. When a page says a protection is authored by this project, it means the code is ours and the defect would be ours. When it says a mechanism is inherited, the credit and the work belong to the project named beside it.

The reverse rule matters as much. We do not claim an upstream hardening feature as a GuardTalkOS feature to make the catalogue look longer. The catalogue on this site lists differentiators rather than the platform baseline. The hardening catalogue →

The base — the Android Open Source Project.

GuardTalkOS is an Android build. The platform sources come from the Android Open Source Project, published by Google under the Apache License 2.0 (Apache-2.0). Individual components within AOSP carry their own compatible licences. source.android.com ↗

Apache-2.0 obliges us to keep copyright and licence notices intact, to carry any NOTICE file forward, and to state where we have changed files. It grants a patent licence, and it does not require our modifications to be published. They are published anyway, because the argument of this whole site depends on it.

Google publishes AOSP. Google does not endorse GuardTalk. We hold no Google certification, and this build is not a Google product.

The kernel.

The Linux kernel is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0). It is copyleft. Whoever receives a binary kernel is entitled to the corresponding sources for it, including the configuration and the build scripts.

We publish the kernel sources for the images we ship, with the tree and the configuration used. We do not point at a generic upstream tag instead. Build it yourself →

The kernel configuration and enforcement state for a release are not described here until they are confirmed against the build tree. The row exists on the status board so that its absence is not mistaken for a claim. Status board →

GrapheneOS-lineage components.

GrapheneOS is a separate, independent project. Its work is published under free licences, its practice informs this build, and it has no relationship with GuardTalk.

Which components in the GuardTalkOS tree derive from GrapheneOS work, and under which licence, is confirmed against the build tree before launch. This page prints the marker rather than a list. Publishing an attribution list we have not verified would be a worse error than publishing none.

// confirm §19.12GrapheneOS-lineage component list and per-component licences

Two commitments hold in the meantime. Every such component will be named with its licence, in this section, before any release is offered. And no page will describe an inherited hardening mechanism as one this project designed.

The Tor Project.

Tor is the transport the system's traffic leaves through, and the way releases are to be distributed (planned — see Releases). The software and the onion-service protocol are the work of the Tor Project and its contributors. torproject.org ↗

The Tor components used in the system, and the licence each carries, are listed here once confirmed. The discipline is the same as the section above.

// confirm §19.12Tor components in use and their licences

The Tor Project does not endorse GuardTalk. Its trademarks are used to identify its software accurately, and never as a badge for this build.

The typefaces this site uses.

Four typefaces are used on this surface, and all four are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (OFL-1.1):

Every font file is self-hosted and subset, and served from this origin. That is a privacy requirement before it is anything else. A webfont fetched from another host would tell that host who read this page. How that is verifiable →

OFL-1.1 requires the licence and copyright notice to travel with the font files. It permits bundling and subsetting, forbids selling the fonts on their own, and forbids using a Reserved Font Name on a modified version. We subset, we do not modify or rename, and the licence text ships with the site's sources.

The GuardTalk wordmark and mark are not fonts and are not covered by any of this. They are drawn artwork under the identity rules. Brand and identity rules →

This site, and the OS sources.

The sources for GuardTalkOS and for this website are published. The licence each repository carries is set out in the repository itself. It is under the same counsel review as the rest of this page.

// confirm §19.12licence for the GuardTalkOS repositories and this site

Publishing sources is not a licence claim on its own, and it is not proof of what a shipped binary contains. The reproducible-build target is what would close that gap. It is planned until a third party can rebuild an image and reach the same digest.

If an attribution here is wrong.

An attribution error is a defect, and it is one we would rather hear about than discover in a forum thread. Tell us and we will correct the page and say what changed.

Reports go to the family disclosure address published in security.txt, at /.well-known/security.txt on this domain. Reporting a problem →

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