Credits and licences
The open-source software Fihris is built on, the notices those licences require, and a word about the man the app is named after.
On this page
Fihris is closed-source, and every dependency in it is audited before it is added — no GPL, no AGPL, no "non-commercial" clause, in the app or anywhere in its dependency tree. This page carries the notices those licences require. The same list is in the app, under Settings ▸ About ▸ Licenses, and it lists what is in that build.
In the app today #
| Component | Licence | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| GRDB.swift | MIT | SQLite full-text search over your Library |
GRDB.swift — Copyright © Gwendal Roué. Licensed under the MIT licence.
Apple frameworks #
SwiftUI, SwiftData, PDFKit, PencilKit, Natural Language, Vision, StoreKit and Foundation Models are Apple frameworks and carry no third-party licence obligation.
App Store and Apple Pencil are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
Bibliography rendering (planned) #
Fihris does not format bibliographies yet. When it does, it will use the components below, and these are the notices they carry. They are listed here in advance because the licences are already audited and the shape of the credit will not change.
Citation styles. Citation styles from the Citation Style Language project — citationstyles.org. CSL styles and locales are licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 and are included unmodified. The author and contributor lists inside each style file are kept exactly as published, and Fihris never edits a bundled style — a style you edit yourself is yours and stays on your device.
Unicode character data. Unicode character data © Unicode, Inc., used under the Unicode License v3. The licence grants permission, free of charge, "to deal in the Data Files or Software without restriction", on the condition that this notice appears with the software or in its documentation — which is what this line is. Full text: spdx.org/licenses/Unicode-3.0.html.
Roman numerals. Roman numeral conversion by roman-numerals-rs, used under the 0BSD licence,
which requires no attribution. It is named here anyway.
The renderer. hayagriva and
citationberg by the Typst authors — MIT or Apache-2.0 — with
biblatex, unscanny, unic-langid, serde, indexmap, thiserror, paste, url,
unicode-segmentation, unicode-normalization, strum, ciborium, half, quick-xml,
serde_path_to_error, hashbrown, idna, yaml_serde, libyaml-rs and their transitive
dependencies, each MIT, Apache-2.0, 0BSD or CC0; and the icu4x family (icu_collator,
icu_locale, tinystr, zerovec and relatives) from the Unicode Consortium, under the Unicode
License v3 covered by the notice above.
The Fihris Intelligence relay #
The relay is a small server we operate; none of its code runs on your device or is linked into the
app. Its dependencies are audited on the same allowlist and are entirely MIT, BSD-3-Clause,
Apache-2.0 or 0BSD — principally @peculiar/x509 (MIT)
for certificate verification and cbor2 (MIT) for decoding
Apple's App Attest payloads, with the @peculiar ASN.1 family, pvtsutils, tsyringe, asn1js
(BSD-3-Clause), reflect-metadata (Apache-2.0) and tslib (0BSD) beneath them.
The relay also embeds two published Apple root certificates — the Apple App Attestation Root CA and Apple Root CA - G3 — as trust anchors. They are public data, not licensed software.
The definitive, per-file list is in the relay's README in the project's source tree, and it is kept in step with the audit.
Typefaces on this site #
This website is set in three typefaces, all licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. Each font file ships here with its licence beside it.
Newsreader — by Production Type. Used for headings and body text.
Copyright 2020 The Newsreader Project Authors (github.com/productiontype/Newsreader)
IBM Plex Sans — by IBM, drawn with Bold Monday. Used for interface text, labels and tables.
Copyright 2019 IBM Corp. All rights reserved.
Amiri — by Khaled Hosny (aliftype). Used for Arabic, including the word فهرس.
Copyright 2010–2022 The Amiri Project Authors (github.com/aliftype/amiri)
Each of these is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. The licence is copied in full beside each font — Newsreader, IBM Plex Sans, Amiri — and is also available, with a FAQ, at scripts.sil.org/OFL.
Sources #
Fihris's Discover searches arXiv, OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, DBLP, CORE and Unpaywall, each under its own terms and rate limits. Thanks to all of them for keeping scholarly metadata open; Fihris would not be possible without it.
Ibn al-Nadim #
Fihris (فهرس) is Arabic for index or catalogue. The name is a nod to Abu al-Faraj Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn al-Nadim al-Warrāq, a bookseller in tenth-century Baghdad who in 987 CE compiled the Kitab al-Fihrist — a catalogue of some 4,300 authors and the books they wrote, and arguably the first reference manager anyone built.
A thousand and thirty-nine years later, this is the same job with a faster index.