CARL is proprietary to Wentzel.ai. All rights reserved. This applies to every artefact in the repository: the reference implementations and tooling (@wentzel/carl-engine, @wentzel/carl-cli), the CARL Standard itself (the spec document and the criteria catalog in @wentzel/carl-spec), the reference prompts, and this docs site's source and prose. No open-source license grant — Apache, Creative Commons, or otherwise — is in effect for any of it today. No permission is granted to copy, redistribute, modify, or create derivative works from CARL code or CARL Standard content without Wentzel.ai's prior written consent.

Current status

If you would like to license, redistribute, or build on any CARL material, email hello@wentzel.ai to discuss terms — nothing here is available for self-service reuse today.

Historical context — earlier open-licensing plans

Under the historical plan, Apache 2.0 would have granted rights to use, modify, and distribute the code, and CC BY 4.0 would have let anyone copy, redistribute, and adapt the standard with attribution. Neither grant exists today. Treat all CARL code and spec content as all rights reserved unless and until this page is updated to say otherwise.

The patent non-assertion covenant

The covenant that was previously published alongside the CC BY 4.0 grant only made sense in the context of an open license: it promised not to assert patent claims against conformant implementations built by third parties, in exchange for those implementers not asserting patent claims back. With no open-license grant in effect, there is no general public permission to build "conformant implementations" of the standard in the first place, so the covenant does not currently apply as a standalone grant. If Wentzel.ai re-introduces an open license for the standard, a patent non-assertion covenant may be reinstated at that time.

What this means in practice

• You may read the spec and docs published at carl.wentzel.ai for your own reference.
• You may not copy, redistribute, modify, or build derivative tooling from CARL code or spec text without a separate written agreement with Wentzel.ai.
• Self-attesting your own repository against the CARL Standard's published levels and criteria (i.e., describing your codebase's readiness using CARL's vocabulary) is a description of your own repository, not a redistribution of CARL's content — but reproducing substantial portions of the spec or catalog text itself is not licensed.

Third-party components

This docs site and the broader monorepo depend on upstream open-source software. Licenses of those components are listed in each package's package.json; an aggregated SBOM is milestone-tagged (M10) work. Those third-party licenses are unaffected by this page — they govern the dependency, not CARL's own code or spec.

Related

• Trademark — how the CARL name and marks may be used.
• Governance of the Standard — how changes to the standard (including license status) are reviewed and decided.
• Conformance claims — how published claims work today, independent of the code/spec license status.