The permissive license for the tie ecosystem — and beyond
The Tie Public License (TPL) is a permissive, attribution-based open source license. It is general-purpose and field-of-use neutral: anyone may adopt it for any kind of work, and anyone may use licensed works for any purpose.
TPL is published and maintained by the TIE-LANG organization. No affiliation with, or endorsement by, the organization is required to use it.
Why TPL
- Universal grant. Use, copy, modify, and redistribute — for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, in any field of endeavor.
- Attribution respected. Notice and attribution obligations protect every rightsholder in the distribution chain (Section 5).
- User Works stay yours. Works you author for or with the Licensed Material are your own — no copyleft, no required notices (Section 4).
- AI terms made explicit. Training a model on Licensed Material is permitted use; model weights and outputs are not Licensed Material (Section 4.4).
- Third-party assets pass through. Licenses and notices accompanying third-party material are preserved and conveyed (Section 6).
- Fair commercial use. You may charge — with honest attribution and disclosure (Sections 2.7, 5.9, 5.10).
Get the text
| TPL 2.3 | current version · plain text available | 2026-09-29 |
| TPL 2.2 | archived | 2026-09-25 |
| TPL 2.1 | archived | 2026-09-17 |
| TPL 2.0 | archived | 2026-09-15 |
The canonical, always-current text is tpl.txt in the tie-lang/TPL repository. The pages on this site are generated from that repository and updated on every version bump.
Using TPL
To apply TPL to your project, place the full license text in a file named
LICENSE at the root of your distribution and attach the short
notice to your source files. See
Using the Tie Public License for the exact notice
format, the interactive-mode notice, and Designation guidance.
Compare licenses
See how TPL 2.3 stacks up against MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD-3-Clause and GPL-3.0 — patent grants, copyleft, AI training terms, trademark protection and more — in the comparison matrix.
FAQ
Questions about commercial use, model training, User Works, hosted services, and trademarks are answered in the frequently asked questions.
About
Who maintains TPL, how versioning works, and why this site looks the way it does: about the Tie Public License.