DotCode format provenance and implementation licence
======================================================

This file records the public engineering basis for DotCode support in Sythos
Barcode Universal. It is not legal advice and it does not grant a patent,
trademark or standards licence.

Implementation licence
----------------------

The DotCode writer, reader, detector, tables and tests in this repository are
original Sythos work and are distributed under the MIT License in the
repository root. The TypeScript sources are authoritative; generated
JavaScript and declaration files are part of the same implementation.

The implementation is dependency-free at runtime. It does not include or
link to ZXing, Zint, BWIPP or another third-party barcode implementation.

Public material and validation boundary
----------------------------------------

The implementation uses public descriptions of the DotCode layout, its
five-of-nine dot assignment, code sets, masking and error-correction
procedure. Public AIM and GS1 resources, the DotCode overview on Wikipedia
and Zint's public DotCode backend were consulted for format understanding and
interoperability cross-checking. Zint, ZXing and any other third-party
software are used only as independent black-box validation or documentation
references. No third-party source code, generated lookup table or runtime
dependency has been copied into or shipped with this SDK.

Patent and trademark review
---------------------------

The repository does not claim that every DotCode patent, patent application,
standard, certification or trademark question has been resolved in every
country. The format name is used descriptively. Users remain responsible for
their own standards, patent, trademark and commercial due diligence before a
regulated or high-volume deployment.

The MIT licence covers this original implementation only. It does not grant
rights that may belong to a standards body, patent holder or trademark owner.
If you have a contrary legal notice, format correction or rights concern,
please open a GitHub issue with the relevant public reference so it can be
reviewed and recorded.

Implementation limits
---------------------

This release intentionally rejects unsupported structured append, ECI,
macro/AI 17 and FNC2/FNC3 control sequences rather than returning a partial or
guessed payload. The detector is limited to clean binary rasters, integer
module scales, bounded dimensions and quarter-turn orientations. These are
documented product boundaries, not claims about the complete DotCode standard.

References
----------

- AIM standards and technical symbology resources:
  https://www.aimglobal.org/standards/
- DotCode overview:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DotCode
- GS1 General Specifications:
  https://ref.gs1.org/standards/genspecs/
- Zint DotCode backend, consulted only as an independent interoperability
  reference:
  https://github.com/zint/zint/blob/master/backend/dotcode.c