Governance

Equilibrium Labs is fully open source. Not open-core, not source-available, not free-tier-with-a-paid-edition. Every artifact the project produces is published under MIT for code or CC BY 4.0 for written material, and there is no component held back.

This is a deliberate choice, and worth stating why, because “open-source the core and monetise the rest” is the more common path.

Why not open-core

Open-core would corrupt the product. What is being built is a set of standards for doing econometrics honestly and reasoning about economics without hidden assumptions. A standard that is partly withheld is not a standard. If the good version of the bias checklist sits behind a licence, the free one is a marketing artifact, and everything the project claims about transparency becomes conditional.

The reviewable version has to be the whole version. The project asks people to trust econometric guidance that will shape analysis they publish. That trust is only earnable if the guidance can be read, criticised, and forked in full by someone who disagrees with it.

There is no paid tier to protect. Nothing here is priced, sold, or licensed for a fee — which is why this site has no pricing page and no hosted offering.

No preferred conclusions

The project takes no policy positions. It has views about method: that clustering level should match treatment assignment, that staggered adoption breaks two-way fixed effects, that a number without a vintage is not a number. It has no view on whether a minimum wage should be raised, and any skill that starts to acquire one is a bug.

That cuts both ways. The reasoning standard treats false balance on a settled question as a defect too — a model that hedges everything has traded a bias for a uselessness.

What is and is not promised

Equilibrium Labs is a single-maintainer project, run at low intensity. That is stated plainly so nobody plans around a support commitment that does not exist:

• No SLA, no response-time guarantee, no roadmap obligation.
• Issues are read; they may not be answered quickly.
• The skills are usable today and versioned, but the pack is v0 — content will change, and skill names may change with it before v1.

What is committed: nothing published here will be relicensed to a restrictive licence, moved behind a paywall, or withdrawn from the public record. CC BY 4.0 and MIT are irrevocable for the versions already published, and that is the point of choosing them.

Funding

The project is currently unfunded — see the funding page. If that changes it will be through grants for open work, the model that funds open central-bank econometrics tooling, and any funding will be disclosed rather than exchanged for restrictions on the software.

Decision-making

Technical decisions are made by the maintainer, in the open, in issues and pull requests on the repository. Where a decision turns on contested econometrics rather than engineering taste, the standard is deference to the applied literature: a rule should be defensible by citation, and a change backed by a citation beats a change backed by an argument.

Review and correction

If a published rule, figure, or method is wrong, open an issue — that is the most valuable contribution the project can receive, and contribute explains what makes a good one. Corrections are tracked in the repository’s history and on the changelog.