License

In one paragraph

You are free to use Mira, study how it works, modify it, and share your modifications. The AGPL adds one specific obligation on top of the ordinary GPL: if you run a modified version of Mira as a network service that other people use, you must offer them the source for your modified version under the same license. Using Mira locally, running it for your own staff or students, and even running it on a public server — without modifying it — does not trigger any publishing obligation beyond keeping the existing license notice in place.

FAQ for universities, NGOs, and institutional users

If you are a compliance officer, IT lead, or grant manager evaluating Mira for your institution, this section is for you. The short answer is that compliance worries are almost always overblown for the way universities and NGOs actually use software. If your situation isn’t covered below, please get in touch — we are happy to work through specifics with you.

1. Can our institution use Mira?

Yes. Researchers, faculty, staff, students, and members may use Mira freely — locally on their own machines or on infrastructure your institution operates — without owing anything to anyone. Internal use carries no publication, registration, or notification obligation.

2. Do we have to publish our research, our library, our notes, or our drafts?

No. The AGPL applies to Mira itself (the software). It does not reach your scholarship: the documents you upload, the annotations you write, the search results you produce, the drafts in your Writing Desk, and any research outputs you create with Mira are entirely yours. The license is silent on what you make with the tool.

3. Can we host Mira for our staff, students, or members?

Yes — on your own servers or any cloud you operate. If you are running an unmodified copy of Mira, you have no source-disclosure obligation beyond leaving the license notice in place. If you intend to host a modified version for other people to use over a network, see question 5.

4. What if we modify Mira for our own purposes?

You are free to modify Mira however you like for your own use, your team’s use, or your institution’s internal use. Modifications that stay inside your institution — never distributed and never offered to outside users over a network — trigger no obligation at all.

5. What if we host a modified Mira for outside users?

This is the one situation the AGPL is designed to cover. If your institution offers a modified Mira to people outside the modifying team over a network (for example, a public-facing instance with custom features), you must offer those users the source code of your modified version under AGPLv3. In practice this usually means publishing your fork on a public repository or providing it on request. There is no fee, no registration, and no notification to anyone — just availability of the source.

6. Aren’t the compliance risks of AGPL serious?

For the typical academic or NGO use, no. The reputation the AGPL has earned in commercial software circles comes from companies that wanted to keep custom modifications private while offering a service built on someone else’s AGPL code. That is exactly the situation the license is designed to address. Institutions that use Mira as-is, or modify it only for internal use, do not fall into that pattern and have no exposure. The license is short, plain, and the FSF maintains an extensive FAQ at gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html.

7. We have a specific concern. Who can we talk to?

Open an issue or discussion on the project’s repository at github.com/MarxReader and describe the use case. We are happy to work with universities, libraries, and NGOs to confirm that a particular deployment plan is uncomplicated — in our experience it almost always is.

Why AGPLv3?

Mira is a research tool for scholars and the institutions that support them. AGPLv3 keeps the project genuinely open: any improvements that end up in a publicly-hosted version come back to the community, so the tool can’t be quietly captured and offered back as a closed service. For the people Mira is built for — researchers, libraries, archives, and the NGOs that work alongside them — this is exactly the protection they need.

Full text of the license