spark -- credits and licenses

spark vendors none of the projects below. bootstrap.sh downloads each one, pinned by version and sha256, from its own upstream to your machine at install time; apt, pacman and Homebrew install the rest from their own repositories. spark's own code is MIT (LICENSE). The banner in home/.config/spark/banner is spark's own artwork.

The engine

llama.cpp -- https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp -- MIT (c) The ggml authors

Release b10689 (LLAMA_VERSION in engine.env), six flavours (macOS arm64, macOS x64, Linux x64, Linux x64 Vulkan, Linux arm64, Linux arm64 Vulkan), each pinned by sha256.

The tale

The text in home/.config/spark/tale is the maintainer's own, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Palettes

Colour values only, no code copied; the license is the upstream's:

• Catppuccin -- https://github.com/catppuccin/catppuccin -- MIT
• Gruvbox -- https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox -- MIT
• Nord -- https://www.nordtheme.com -- MIT
• Selenized -- https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized -- MIT
• Solarized -- https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized -- MIT
• Tokyo Night -- https://github.com/folke/tokyonight.nvim -- Apache-2.0

The AI's packages (apt or pacman, Linux; macOS needs none)

None of these is shipped by spark; apt or pacman installs them from the distro's own repositories, unpinned. The names are the distro's own, as distro/debian.env and distro/arch.env list them (tests/docs_test.py checks every name there is credited here); where the two families name one project differently, both names are here.

• git -- GPL-2.0-only
• curl -- the curl license
• ca-certificates -- MPL-2.0 (Mozilla's bundle, as the distro ships it)
• python3 -- PSF-2.0
• python -- PSF-2.0 (python3, on Arch)
• libgomp1 -- GPL-3.0-or-later, with the GCC runtime exception
• gcc-libs -- GPL-3.0-or-later, with the GCC runtime exception (libgomp, on Arch; in base there)
• libvulkan1 -- Apache-2.0 (the vulkan build only)
• vulkan-icd-loader -- Apache-2.0 (libvulkan1, on Arch; the vulkan build only)
• mesa-vulkan-drivers -- MIT and others (the vulkan build only)
• vulkan-radeon -- MIT and others (Mesa's AMD driver, on Arch; the vulkan build only)
• vulkan-intel -- MIT and others (Mesa's Intel driver, on Arch; the vulkan build only)
• kbd -- https://kbd-project.org/ -- GPL-2.0-or-later (setvtrgb, the console palette unit, on Arch)

The shell tools

The look and the workstation tools -- tmux, starship, the Nerd Font, bat, eza, fzf, zoxide, ripgrep, fd, jq, btop -- are spark-shell's, its own repository with its own credits (github.com/forgewright-ai/spark-shell). An editor's plugin is its own repository too (github.com/forgewright-ai/<name> -- spark-micro, spark-neovim, spark-vim, spark-helix, spark-nano, spark-w3m, spark-newsboat).

Models

Downloaded by bootstrap.sh, never vendored. Each row's size and sha256 come from Hugging Face's file metadata; every row in models.env names its license. GGUF quantizations by bartowski and unsloth.

• Qwen3 (1.7B, 4B, 4B-Thinking, 8B, 14B, 30B-A3B, Coder-30B-A3B) and Qwen2.5 (7B, 14B, Coder-7B) -- https://huggingface.co/Qwen -- Apache-2.0
• Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 and Mistral Nemo 12B -- https://huggingface.co/mistralai -- Apache-2.0
• Phi-4 and Phi-4 mini -- https://huggingface.co/microsoft -- MIT
• DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 7B and 14B -- https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai -- MIT
• SmolLM2 1.7B -- https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceTB -- Apache-2.0
• gpt-oss-20b -- https://huggingface.co/openai -- Apache-2.0
• Granite 4.2 8B -- https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite -- Apache-2.0
• Llama 3.2 1B / 3B and Llama 3.1 8B -- https://huggingface.co/meta-llama -- the Llama Community License: not an open-source license, spark asks before downloading
• Gemma 3 1B / 4B / 12B / 27B -- https://ai.google.dev/gemma/terms -- the Gemma Terms of Use: not an open-source license, spark asks before downloading

Built with Claude

The v1.0 refactor and simplification -- the layer split, the guided first run, the model catalog, the chooser, the chat, the fresh-account proofs, and these docs -- were designed and implemented with Claude (Anthropic) in Claude Code, directed and reviewed by the maintainer.

Every such commit carries a Co-Authored-By: Claude trailer, so git log tells the same story as this paragraph. The mistakes are the maintainer's.

Corrections

A correction or a missing name is a pull request away.

• Simple Icons -- the Debian, Arch, Apple and GitHub glyphs inline on the front of spark.forgewright.ai (the Windows panes are drawn by hand). CC0 1.0. https://simpleicons.org