Model licensing

Applies to the optional spaCy NER models used by the privacy gate (hooks ingest → mcp_server/utils/privacy.py) and the graph miners. Read this before changing how they are distributed, and before answering a licensing question about them.

What we do

We do not redistribute the models. a-memory depends on spacy (MIT), which is normal and unrestricted, and the models are installed separately by the user through a-memory-ner, straight from Explosion's own release URLs. The URLs live in mcp_server/utils/ner_models.py; nothing of the models themselves is vendored, copied into the wheel, or shipped in the sdist.

Stated reason: the models are not on PyPI (en-core-web-sm 404s; ru-core-news-sm resolves to an unrelated 999.9.9 placeholder), and PyPI rejects any distribution whose metadata carries a direct URL — which is how 1.11.0 failed its upload. But that is a packaging constraint, not the licensing argument. The licensing argument is that a user fetching a wheel from its publisher is the normal path, and it keeps us out of the redistribution question entirely.

What the licenses actually say

Verified from the installed METADATA and LICENSES_SOURCES, not from memory.

Model code — MIT. Both en_core_web_sm and ru_core_news_sm 3.8.0 ship License: MIT, Copyright 2021 ExplosionAI GmbH. Commercial use, modification and redistribution of the model code are permitted with attribution.

Training data is where the restrictions are, and they differ per model. This is the part that a bare License: MIT in METADATA hides:

Model	Source	License as declared
en_core_web_sm	OntoNotes 5	commercial (licensed by Explosion)
en_core_web_sm	ClearNLP dependency conversion	citation only, no code packaged
en_core_web_sm	WordNet 3.0	WordNet 3.0 License
ru_core_news_sm	Nerus	MIT

So the English model carries an obligation Explosion acquired and paid for, and the Russian model does not. That difference is why "the models are MIT" is not a safe sentence to write.

The rule that follows

A redistributor of en_core_web_sm inherits an obligation we have no way to satisfy. We are not one, and we do not intend to become one:

• never vendor a model wheel into the repository, the wheel or the sdist;
• never re-upload a model to an index under our name;
• a-memory-ner installs from Explosion's URLs — do not replace them with a mirror of ours, which would make us the distributor.

This is the conservative reading, and the cost of it is zero: the user runs one command that we document. When in doubt, do not redistribute.

Not legal advice. The primary sources are in every install: <model>.dist-info/LICENSE and LICENSES_SOURCES. For a commercial deployment that depends on redistributing a model, ask a lawyer, not a README.