📢 Cognition Graph 正式采用 Apache 2.0 协议

[sole03]

Announcing Apache 2.0 Licensing and Trademark Policy

Today I'm happy to announce that MCP Rule Engine is now fully licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, with a formal Trademark Policy (see TRADEMARK.md) for the "Cognition Graph" brand.

This is the result of commit 8ea3944, which added Apache 2.0 headers to all 53 source files (36 in src/, 17 in tests/) and established a GitHub Actions workflow to enforce compliance on every PR and push.

Why Apache 2.0

Apache 2.0 was chosen over more permissive licenses (MIT, BSD) for three reasons:

• Patent protection — Apache 2.0 includes an express grant of patent rights from contributors to users, which is critical for a project that operates at the AST/cognition layer where novel algorithms may be involved.
• Ecosystem trust — Apache 2.0 is the standard for enterprise-grade open-source infrastructure (Kubernetes, Apache projects, etc.). It signals that this project takes licensing seriously.
• Contributor clarity — Contributions are automatically accepted under the same license (Section 5), eliminating ambiguity about intellectual property.

What This Means for You

Role	Impact
Individual developers	Free to use, modify, and distribute the software in personal, academic, or commercial projects under Apache 2.0 terms. No additional permission needed.
Enterprises	Safe to adopt in internal toolchains and commercial products. The explicit patent grant and disclaimer of warranty (Sections 3, 7, 8) provide the legal clarity that corporate legal teams require.
Contributors	By submitting a PR, you agree that your contribution is licensed under Apache 2.0 (Section 5). You retain copyright over your contributions.
Commercial vendors	You may embed this engine in your products under Apache 2.0 terms. If you need to use the "Cognition Graph" trademark in your product name or marketing, refer to TRADEMARK.md or open a Commercial Licensing Discussion.

Permanent Open-Source Commitment

This project will remain open-source under Apache 2.0 indefinitely. The trademark policy exists solely to prevent brand confusion and consumer deception — it does not restrict your right to use the code.

Key commitments:

• The core cognition engine, graph traversal, AST constraint solver, and all MCP tools will always be Apache 2.0.
• The governance layer (injection approval, feedback loop, audit logging) will always be Apache 2.0.
• The Trademark Policy will not be retroactively tightened.

Feedback and Questions

• License or legal questions: Open a Discussion in the Q&A category
• Commercial trademark licensing: See TRADEMARK.md → Commercial Licensing category
• Report a license header issue: The CI workflow (.github/workflows/license-check.yml) checks every PR — open an Issue if you find a file missing its header

Thanks to everyone who has contributed issues, ideas, and encouragement. This project started as a fork and has grown into something genuinely novel — a cognition graph engine with a trust governance layer that I believe will change how AI agents interact with codebases.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.