license: schemas are MIT, prose is CC BY 4.0

[RevenuePuzzles]

What this PR does

The site says "the schema is MIT". The repo said CC BY 4.0. Someone had to move, and the schemas should. The whole point of publishing the heuristics, the trust ladder, and the gap taxonomy as YAML is that other people put them inside things — a CI check, a linter, a product's own config. Creative Commons states plainly that its licenses are not intended for software, and plenty of legal teams will not approve CC-licensed files in a codebase. A license that makes an adopter open a ticket is a license that loses the adoption. Attribution is still wanted, and CITATION.cff makes it one click; it is just no longer a condition of use.

The rule is now one line: machine-readable definitions are MIT, prose is CC BY 4.0. If you embed it, MIT. If you read it, CC BY.

Linked Issue

None. This is a licensing decision made directly, not an ID or vocabulary change — CONTRIBUTING requires a debate Issue for those, not for this.

Type

• New pattern
• New gap
• Teardown
• Framework edit (must include rationale, ID migration note if renamed, updated examples)
• Schema fix
• Doc fix / typo / link
• Other

No schema content changes — only the # License: header line in each file. No IDs affected.

The inconsistency this also fixes

The schemas did not agree with each other, before any question of what the site said:

File	Header said
memory-policy.schema.yaml	# License: MIT
aux-heuristics.yaml, trust-architecture.yaml, trust-gap-taxonomy.yaml, trust-contract.yaml	# License: CC BY 4.0
agent-spec.schema.yaml	(no license line at all)

All six now read # License: MIT (see schemas/LICENSE).

Changes

• schemas/LICENSE (new) — MIT, stating what it covers and what it does not
• LICENSING.md — rewritten around the rule, with the reasoning and a practical "what this means" section
• packages/aux-audit — the carve-out declaring bundled YAML as CC is gone; sync-schemas.mjs now copies schemas/LICENSE into the tarball, so the files carry their license next to them on npm
• CITATION.cff — license: [MIT, CC-BY-4.0], accurate for a mixed work
• README, REPO_STRUCTURE, CONTRIBUTING, docs/schemas.md, profile/README, for-ctos.md, A2-cto-exec-brief.md — restated

On the GitHub badge

The root LICENSE stays CC BY 4.0, so the badge still reads CC BY 4.0. That is correct — GitHub detects the root file, which covers the prose, most of the repository by volume. It is not a statement about schemas/. Rather than leave the badge to imply something wrong, LICENSING.md and the README now say this explicitly, in the place a maintainer checking the license would look.

Contribution bar — checklist

• I've read CONTRIBUTING.md.
• If this introduces or renames an ID, I opened a debate Issue first. — no IDs touched.
• If this adds a pattern, it has a diagram, a runnable example, and an anti-pattern. — n/a.
• If this adds a gap, it has a reproducible scenario and references a heuristic or trust stage. — n/a.
• CI passes (schema validation, link check). — verified locally: 34/34 aux-audit tests, check:schemas clean after adding LICENSE to the synced set, check-coverage.py 12/12, yamllint clean, all relative links resolve.
• No emoji in code or schemas.
• Short sentences. Named things over adjectives.

Out of scope

repos/agentic-ux-patterns stays CC BY 4.0 — including the example.py files the repo itself describes as copy-paste. The same embedding argument probably applies to them, and leaving them CC reproduces exactly the friction this PR removes elsewhere. But that is a second decision, and making it quietly inside a PR about schemas would be the wrong way to make it. Worth a follow-up.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01MhpqWEvwKp7NrmJfdXYq4M

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