MacStep Licences
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Licences GPL-3.0

What you may do with this.

MacStep and everything it is built on

MacStep itself

GNU General Public License, version 3. Run it for any purpose, read it, change it, pass it on. No fee, no permission, no registration.

The condition is reciprocity: if you distribute MacStep — as-is, modified, or as part of a larger work — the recipient gets the source under the GPL as well. What you may not do is take it closed.

Open CASCADE Technology

The geometry kernel — it parses STEP and IGES, tessellates surfaces, and computes the hidden-line removal behind the drawing mode. LGPL-2.1, with the Open CASCADE exception.

MacStep links it dynamically and ships it as separate shared libraries inside the application bundle, and does not modify its source. Open CASCADE states that OCCT "is released under the terms of the GNU LGPL version 2.1 (and some minor additional permissions), so it is fully compatible with the GNU GPL version 2 and later" — which is what makes this combination lawful. You are free to replace the bundled libraries with your own build.

Source: dev.opencascade.org.

Rust libraries

Every crate MacStep depends on is MIT, Apache-2.0, or dual-licensed under both — all compatible with the GPL. The significant ones:

  • eframe / egui — the interface toolkit. MIT or Apache-2.0.
  • wgpu — GPU rendering, via Metal, Vulkan or DX12. MIT or Apache-2.0.
  • glam — vector and matrix maths. MIT or Apache-2.0.
  • cxx — the C++ bridge to Open CASCADE. MIT or Apache-2.0.
  • rfd — native file dialogs. MIT.
  • image — PNG encoding for screenshots. MIT or Apache-2.0.
  • stl_io, lib3mf — mesh format readers. MIT / BSD-2-Clause.
  • printpdf — PDF drawing-sheet export. MIT.

For the exact resolved set of any build, run cargo tree in the repository.

Typefaces on this site

  • Archivo — Omnibus-Type. SIL Open Font License 1.1.
  • IBM Plex Mono — IBM. SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Both are served from this site rather than a font CDN, so viewing these pages contacts nobody else.

Full texts

The complete licence texts ship in the LICENSES directory of the repository, alongside NOTICE.