Computer Use provenance

Maka‘s Computer Use surface was built against other people’s work, in three materially different ways. They are separated here because the obligations differ: one is redistribution under a license, one is reading licensed source, and one is observing a proprietary binary and holds no license grant at all.

Paths are Maka's unless they carry the upstream repository name, as in open-codex-computer-use/....

Every entry names what was taken, where it landed, and what the evidence was. When you add or change a borrowed design, add the row here and put the same statement in the file that carries it — an in-file comment answers “why is this constant 200?” at the moment someone asks it, and this file answers “what did we build on?” for the project as a whole.

1. Redistributed under license

Ships inside the Maka artifact. Requires the license text and copyright notice to travel with it.

ComponentLicenseWhere the notice lives
npm dependenciesvariousapps/desktop/resources/licenses/npm/, generated by scripts/generate-third-party-notices.mjs and byte-checked at build by scripts/check-third-party-notices.mjs

Maka has one Computer Use executor, maka-cu. It is built from Maka's own source by scripts/prepare-maka-cu.mjs and pinned by digest in apps/desktop/bundled-tools.json. It is not signed, so it is not distributed: its distributionReady is false and scripts/verify-macos-arm64-dmg.mjs forbids its path in a packaged build. Nothing third-party ships inside the Maka artifact for Computer Use, which is why the table above has one row.

The third-party executor Maka used to run, cua-driver, was removed along with its vendored notice. Nothing in this tree spawns it or links against it.

maka-cu is itself a fork of MIT-licensed iFurySt/open-codex-computer-use (§2), so when it does ship, that notice travels with it.

2. Licensed source read as reference

MIT-licensed source we read while designing. No code was copied into this repository; what was taken is design — a format, a decision, or an archived measurement. Attribution is given because it was load-bearing, not because MIT compels it for ideas.

iFurySt/open-codex-computer-use, and its fork QwenLM/open-computer-use

Both MIT, © 2026 Leo. An independent reimplementation of Codex's Computer Use as an MCP server.

TakenLanded inNotes
An archived capture of Codex's real get_app_state resultpackages/runtime/src/computer-use-tools.tsTheir open-codex-computer-use/artifacts/tool-comparisons/20260417-focus-behavior/. This is what turned Maka‘s model of Codex’s observation format from inference into an observed sample.
The one-line-per-element observation shape: indentation for containment, states written only when not the defaultsame fileMaka‘s version keeps observation_id in the header (frame binding is protocol here, prose there) and keeps element geometry (Codex has no coordinate action surface to need it; Maka’s is disabled by default rather than absent).
Writing only the informative half of a state — disabled, never enabledsame fileTheir summarizeTraits.
Filtering AXPress out of an element's advertised action list, because pressing is what click doesnot yet landed — waits on trycua/cua#2622 exposing per-element AX actionsTheir meaningfulActions.
The permission-onboarding pattern: anchor a guidance panel to the System Settings window, track it, and distinguish grants that need an app relaunchnot yet landed — for the feat/permission-onboarding workTheir open-codex-computer-use/apps/OpenComputerUse/Sources/OpenComputerUse/PermissionOnboardingApp.swift.
Archiving side-by-side tool captures in-repo as evidencepractice, not codeWorth adopting for Maka's own Codex comparisons.

Not taken, recorded so the decision is not re-litigated: their SkyLightSPI / SkyClickSimulation synthetic-focus click. Their own comment states the recipe is derived from cua-driver and yabai. Maka read the same recipe rather than that code — which is why removing the cua-driver binary from this tree changes nothing here: what was borrowed was a published recipe, not the artifact.

3. Observed, not licensed

Codex Computer Use (SkyComputerUseService and its helper bundles) is proprietary and ships no source. Nothing was copied from it, because there is nothing to copy: what exists here was reimplemented from observed behaviour and from constants recovered by inspecting the shipped binary.

This confers no rights and is not a license. Statements about it are descriptions of what a build did on a given date, and are dated for that reason.

RecoveredLanded in
The agent cursor: shape, hotspot, motion thresholds, spring constants, and the candidate-path scoring functionapps/desktop/src/renderer/computer-use-overlay/engine/cursor-engine.ts
Overlay level policy — an occluded target raises the cursor rather than hiding itsame file, and apps/desktop/src/main/computer-use/cursor-overlay-window.ts
The observation text shapepackages/runtime/src/computer-use-tools.ts, corroborated by the archived capture in §2

Where Maka deliberately diverges, the divergence is stated at the point of divergence rather than here, so it is read by whoever is changing that code.