On the category of props

Abstract: The category of (colored) props is an enhancement of the category of colored operads, and thus of the category of small categories. The titular category has nice formal properties: it is bicomplete and is a symmetric monoidal category, with monoidal product closely related to the Boardman-Vogt tensor product of operads. Tools developed in this article, which is the first part of a larger work, include a generalized version of multilinearity of functors, a free prop construction defined on certain "generalized graphs", and the relationship between the category of props and the categories of permutative categories and of operads.