diff --git a/LICENSE b/LICENSE
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+Copyright (c) 2017 Stefan Marr <git@stefan-marr.de>
+
+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.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
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+Black Diamonds: Reusable Components for Truffle Languages
+=========================================================
+
+<img src="https://github.com/SOM-st/black-diamonds/raw/master/docs/sliced-black-truffle-by-mortazavifar-ccbysa40.jpg" align="right" width="200" height="170" alt="Sliced Black Truffles (By Mortazavifar, CC BY-SA 4.0)" title="Sliced Black Truffles (By Mortazavifar, CC BY-SA 4.0)">
+
+The goal of this project is to build a collection of reusable components for
+Truffle language implementers.
+
+Ideally, the components remain somewhat independent of each other, and
+independent of specific language semantics. However, because of the way they
+are developed, there is a certain bias towards languages with simple, uniform,
+and consistent semantics.
+
+Thus, the black diamonds might not be applicable directly to your language
+implementation. We are happy to further generalize the components and include
+changes, but sometimes, things are too different, and it might be easier to
+devise a simpler solution specific to a language.
+
+
+Guidelines and Principles
+=========================
+
+ - designed to build the "right" thing for today, not to defend against tomorrow
+ - there is no backwards compatibility
+ - keep things simple
+ - to support research
+ - the guidelines can change at any point in time 
+
+
+License and Acknowledgements
+============================
+
+This project heavily relies on the [Truffle] framework developed by Oracle Labs.
+
+The included components are developed in the context of [TruffleSOM], [SOMns], [TruffleMate], and [Grace (SOMns)][grace].
+
+Information on previous authors are included in the AUTHORS file. This code is
+distributed under the MIT License. Please see the LICENSE file for details.
+
+[Truffle]: https://github.com/graalvm/graal/tree/master/truffle
+[TruffleSOM]: https://github.com/SOM-st/TruffleSOM
+[SOMns]: https://github.com/smarr/SOMns
+[TruffleMate]: https://github.com/charig/TruffleMate
+[grace]: https://github.com/richard-roberts/SOMns/tree/temporary-fixes-for-execution
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