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ADR-0002: the model is marola-gpt, and marola-ml's licence restricts it to marola
Status Proposed (2026-10-14), by the owner's order; its licence (decision 3) and the name marolaGPT superseded by ADR 0003 the same day
Builds on ADR 0001, the fork of nanoGPT
Needs the written agreement of every contributor whose code is relicensed (below), and an umbrella MIP for the licence of a marola repository

Context

The owner, 14 October 2026: "state this repo as a nanoGPT fork from Karpathy. This repository will contain efforts of building its own model from scratch. the name of distribution will be marola-gpt. Make sure all the tooling, marola-corpus ingest to HuggingFace publish. account used will still be h0ffmann for while. And LICENSE of marola-ml, will be restricted rights to marola contributors. Not allowed any distribution of marola-gpt outside of marola-dev repository. There are many other forks out there and this is educational distribution of a model (SML)".

Decision

  1. The name. The model trained in sea/ is marola-gpt; its releases are marola-gpt-<version>.
  2. The chain. just marola-gpt <version>: the pinned corpus, the dataset, training from random weights, the release directory (weights, vocabulary, card, licence, checksums), then the upload to h0ffmann/marola-gpt on Hugging Face, a dry run unless --yes. In CI, marola-gpt-publish.yml, dispatched by hand, a dry run by default. It replaces marola-sea-publish.yml, the Llama path's publish, which is removed (the owner's choice, 14 October 2026).
  3. The licence. LICENSE becomes the marola-ml Restricted License: marola-dev's contributors may use the repository inside marola-dev; others may read and cite it; marola-gpt may not be distributed outside marola-dev's channels.

Consequences

  • What the licence cannot change. The code in sea/nanogpt/ stays under Karpathy's MIT License: anyone may still take nanoGPT itself under MIT. A version published before the change stays MIT. The licence binds what marola owns: its own code and the weights it trains.
  • The contributors. On 14 October 2026, git shortlog on main lists commits by Matheus Hoffmann and Bruno Guilhermo de Barros Valério (24), besides bots. Code that a contributor wrote under MIT can be relicensed only with that contributor's agreement: each one's written agreement is a condition of merging this change.
  • Hugging Face is a channel outside the organisation. The licence names h0ffmann/marola-gpt as marola's channel while the owner keeps it so. publish_hf.py creates the repository private; making it public is the owner's act on Hugging Face.
  • No workflow artifact. On a public repository any GitHub user can download a workflow's artifacts, so marola-gpt-publish.yml keeps none.
  • Wording. The licence was written by an agent, from the owner's words, and not by a lawyer.