Howland third-party notices
Revision 1
Howland includes the independent components below. Each is used under its own license, and those terms govern those components.
This page mirrors the third-party notices maintained in the Howland source repository. Where the two ever differ, the notices file in that repository governs. A generated component list produced from the shipped build supersedes this summary when it lands.
Runtime programs
These are installed or bundled as separate programs and invoked across a process boundary. They are not linked into Howland and their licenses do not extend to it.
| Component | Role | License |
|---|---|---|
| llama.cpp (llama-server) | Runs the models | MIT License |
| llama-swap | Loads and swaps models on demand | MIT License |
| kiwix-tools (kiwix-serve) | Serves the offline library archives | GNU GPL v3 |
| SearXNG | The self-hosted web search service | GNU AGPL v3 |
| opencode | The coding agent, bundled unmodified as a sidecar | MIT License |
| openzim-mcp, mcp-searxng | Bridges from the agent to the library and to search | Their own open-source licenses |
kiwix-tools is used under the GPL and SearXNG under the AGPL. Both are run as separate, unmodified programs; their corresponding source is available from their own projects, and Howland makes no claim over either. If you make a modified SearXNG available to others over a network, the AGPL's source-offer obligation applies to you as the operator.
Client application
The Howland desktop and mobile apps are built from a fork of OpenWork, used under the MIT License, branded at build time only. Upstream copyright notices are retained in the distributed application.
Maps and fonts
| Component | License or terms |
|---|---|
| MapLibre GL, vendored, no content delivery network | BSD 3-Clause License |
| PMTiles | BSD 3-Clause License |
| OpenStreetMap map data, the whole-world basemap | © OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database License (ODbL) |
| Asimovian | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
| IBM Plex Sans, IBM Plex Mono | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
Model weights
Howland downloads open-weight models published by third parties and runs them unchanged. They are not distributed with the installer, and each carries its own license from its publisher, presented when you install it. The models installed by default come from the Qwen and gpt-oss open-weight families.
The offline library
The library is assembled from public archives published in the openZIM format. Each keeps the license of its source project, and Howland redistributes none of them; the installer downloads the archives you choose from their public sources.
The sources include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikivoyage, and Simple Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, with some media under other free licenses); Project Gutenberg (public domain in the United States, subject to the Project Gutenberg license terms); Stack Overflow (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike); Khan Academy and TED (their own terms of use); iFixit repair guides (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike); Appropedia and energypedia (Creative Commons); medical reference collections and the zimgit survival set (their own terms); and the openZIM project's tooling itself (GNU GPL v3).