License
FracSTAT is free, open-source software. The software is distributed under the terms of the MIT License, reproduced in full below, while this documentation — every page of this site, plus the PDF User Manual — is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Covering code and prose with two short, permissive licenses was a deliberate choice (see the Introduction): the project exists to remove barriers to quantitative fracture-network analysis, and a restrictive license would work against that goal.
On this page
1. MIT License — Full Text
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2026 FracSTAT Project
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
The authoritative copy of this license always lives in the LICENSE file at
the root of the GitHub repository;
the text above is reproduced here for convenience.
2. What the MIT License Means in Practice
| You may | You must | You do not have to |
|---|---|---|
| Use FracSTAT for academic, commercial, or personal work, free of charge; modify the source; distribute your own copies or forks; incorporate FracSTAT's code into a larger project. | Keep the copyright notice and license text in any copy or substantial portion of the source you redistribute. | Pay any licensing fee; open-source your own downstream project; ask permission before using FracSTAT. |
The license also means FracSTAT is provided "as is," without warranty of any kind. See the Disclaimer page for what that means in the specific context of geoscience and engineering analysis.
3. Documentation License (CC BY 4.0)
The MIT License above governs FracSTAT's source code. The written and visual content of this documentation — the text of every page, the tables, the diagrams and annotated screenshots, and the PDF User Manual — is licensed separately under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
| You may | You must | You do not have to |
|---|---|---|
| Copy and redistribute this documentation in any medium or format; remix, adapt, translate, or build upon it — including for commercial purposes. Reproducing a figure or a passage in a paper, thesis, lecture, or training course is expressly permitted. | Give appropriate credit to the FracSTAT Project, provide a link to this documentation or to the CC BY 4.0 license, and indicate whether you made changes. | Ask permission; pay a fee; apply the same license to your own derivative work. |
CC BY 4.0 adds no restrictions beyond attribution, and it may not be applied in a way that legally restricts others from doing anything the license permits. A suggested attribution line:
FracSTAT Documentation, FracSTAT Project — licensed under CC BY 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Note the split: reuse of code follows the MIT terms in section 1, reuse of documentation follows CC BY 4.0. Third-party dependencies keep their own licenses, as described next.
4. Third-Party Dependencies
FracSTAT is built on top of a number of open-source scientific Python libraries —
including NumPy, pandas, Matplotlib, SciPy, the powerlaw package, and
PySide6 (Qt for Python), among others referenced throughout this documentation. Each of these
carries its own license (most are BSD, MIT, or Apache-2.0; PySide6 is distributed under
the LGPL-3.0). FracSTAT does not alter or
override those licenses; consult each project's own repository for its exact terms. A
consolidated list of dependencies and their versions is maintained in the
requirements.txt file described in the Installation Guide.
5. Citing FracSTAT
If FracSTAT contributes to a publication, thesis, or report, the authors would appreciate a citation acknowledging the software and, where relevant, the specific module(s) used (Static, Dynamic, or Uncertainty Analyzer). See the Introduction page for the full author list and affiliations, and the Contact page for how to reach the team with a citation request or to confirm the preferred citation format for the current release.
6. Source Code
The complete, unmodified source code — including this documentation site's own source — is publicly available at github.com/sachi5908/FracSTAT.