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Hyperion Gray License Tarot |
Sometimes you don’t want a legal decision tree.
Sometimes you want vibes.
Draw a card (or several) and see which license archetype calls to you.
Keywords: Freedom, curiosity, safe harbor, tinkering
Upright: Encourages exploration, fosters a healthy ecosystem, grants broad permissions while protecting good-faith researchers.
Reversed: Corporate panic, overreliance on NDAs, pretending security through obscurity is enough.
Meaning:
If this card appears, you probably want a permissive license that still explicitly defends people who poke at your stuff to make it better.
Keywords: Protection, boundary, ethics, partial copyleft
Upright: Keeps researcher rights attached to the code wherever it goes; demands that downstream users respect the same ethical floor.
Reversed: Legal overcomplication, risk-averse counsel trying to neuter the terms.
Meaning:
You want your work to be borrowed responsibly, and you’re okay with a bit of viral behavior as long as it’s about ethics, not control.
Keywords: Forces, interaction, core vs periphery
Upright: Recognizes that some parts of the system are core, others peripheral; propagates protections like a field through dependent modules.
Reversed: Overengineering, drawing unnecessarily complex architecture diagrams to justify your licensing choices.
Meaning:
You think in systems, not files. You want differential obligations based on how “close” something is to the core.
Keywords: Frames, observers, velocity
Upright: Accepts that vendors, researchers, and regulators see things differently, but enforces researcher protections across all frames.
Reversed: “But from our perspective…” weaponized as an excuse.
Meaning:
You care about context and impact. Higher velocity and broader deployment should carry higher transparency and clearer ethics.
Keywords: Expansion, ratchet, horizon
Upright: Researcher rights can only grow stronger across forks; the ecosystem becomes more protective over time.
Reversed: Attempts to shrink rights; closed ecosystems that repel community improvements.
Meaning:
You see your project as part of an expanding universe. You want downstream forks to make things better, not worse, for researchers.
Keywords: Axioms, proofs, rigor
Upright: Clean definitions, logical constraints, potentially formalizable in theorem provers.
Reversed: Bikeshedding about notation, arguments over whether “⊆” was the right choice.
Meaning:
You want your license to be something a grad student could, in principle, prove theorems about. You enjoy pain.
Keywords: Superposition, paradox, collapse
Upright: Embraces ambiguity and contradiction, but always resolves in favor of researcher protection.
Reversed: Misinterpretation by people who don’t get the joke, or take it too seriously.
Meaning:
You enjoy the fact that your license can be both permissive and restrictive depending on who’s looking; you want to encode that reality.
Keywords: Code, meta, simulation
Upright: A Python file that “decides” whose interpretation wins, leaning toward Hyperion Gray and researchers.
Reversed: Someone attempts to present the Python module as actual legal authority.
Meaning:
You want your repo to contain a runnable joke that explains the spirit of the license better than a wall of text.
- Think about your project.
- Shuffle mentally (or scroll wildly).
- Stop and pick a card.
- Read the meaning.
- Check out the corresponding license text in:
THE_HYPERION_GRAY_BOOK_ON_LICENSING.md
If in doubt, remember:
The card that makes you laugh is probably the right one.