flit_core bundles the 'tomli' TOML parser, to avoid a [bootstrapping problem](https://github.com/pypa/packaging-problems/issues/342). tomli is packaged using Flit, so there would be a dependency cycle when building from source. Vendoring a copy of tomli avoids this. The code in tomli is under the MIT license, and the LICENSE file is in the .dist-info folder. If you want to unbundle tomli and rely on it as a separate package, you can replace the package with Python code doing 'from tomli import *'. You will probably need to work around the dependency cycle between flit_core and tomli. Bundling a TOML parser should be a special case - I don't plan on bundling anything else in flit_core (or depending on any other packages). I hope that a TOML parser will be added to the Python standard library, and then this bundled parser will go away.