Licensing

Velum is source-available, not OSI open source. Two sets of terms apply, and which one you need depends on what you are using and why.

The engine

The masking engine is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. We intend to publish it to npm as @velumprivacy/* so anyone can read exactly what runs on their data and check the offline claim for themselves. Auditability is the whole reason for the source-available posture.

Not published yet. The packages are ready to release but have not been, so today the source is not in fact available to read. The licence below already governs the code; it simply has no audience until we ship it.

Free, with no application needed

PolyForm Noncommercial permits these outright, regardless of how you are funded:

• Personal use: research, experiment, testing, private study, hobby projects.
• Charitable organisations.
• Educational institutions.
• Public research organisations.
• Public safety and public health organisations.
• Environmental protection organisations.
• Government institutions.

Commercial use needs a paid licence

If you or your company use Velum in, or for, a commercial activity, you need a commercial licence. That includes using it internally at a for-profit company, even when the tool is not what you sell.

In between? Ask.

Non-profits that do not fit the categories above, students, educators, academics and independent researchers can apply for a free licence. Tell us who you are and what you are doing with it. We would rather grant one than have you guess.

The apps

The desktop app and browser extension are closed and proprietary. They are not published to any registry and will not be open-sourced. Using them is governed by their own commercial terms and a licence key, not by PolyForm.

The extension masks text for free with no key and no time limit, and a key unlocks file masking and in-page masking. The desktop app runs a 7-day trial with no key and no account, after which a key is needed to keep masking. In both cases unmasking is never gated. If a licence lapses you can still restore anything you have already masked. Locking you out of your own data would be a strange way to run a privacy tool.

Why not open source?

PolyForm Noncommercial does not meet the Open Source Definition, because it restricts a field of endeavour: commercial use. So we do not call Velum open source, and we would ask you not to either. “Source-available, noncommercial” is the accurate phrase. The practical difference that matters to most people is that you can read the code and verify what it does, which is the part that makes a privacy claim checkable rather than promotional.

Common questions