Licensing Strategy ​

Issue: #551 · Date: 2026-05-03 · Status: Canonical

Decision ​

VERA is proprietary, closed-source software. All rights are reserved by talktalkmake. The full licence text is in LICENSE at the repo root.

Rationale ​

Why proprietary? ​

VERA is a single-author commercial product. There is no contributor community, no reason to share the implementation, and no strategic benefit to open-sourcing the code at this stage. Proprietary licensing:

  • Prevents any other party from forking, repackaging, or reselling VERA
  • Removes GPL copyleft contamination as a concern for the codebase itself (we are not distributing a binary that links GPL code to end users)
  • Preserves future optionality: open-sourcing later is straightforward; un-open-sourcing after the fact is impossible

Why not MIT or Apache 2.0? ​

Both MIT and Apache 2.0 would allow any party to take the source code and deploy a competing product. That is the primary risk the proprietary licence is designed to prevent.

Why not AGPL? ​

AGPL would require that any modified version of VERA deployed over a network be published under the same terms. This would not prevent a competing SaaS deployment of VERA's own code if the competitor also published their changes — an unacceptable exposure for a commercial product.

Portions of VERA were written with AI assistance (Claude Code, Anthropic). Under current case law (Thaler v. Perlmutter and subsequent rulings), copyright protection attaches only to work reflecting meaningful human creative choices. Directing how the work is constructed — not merely specifying an objective — establishes authorship.

The record of human creative direction is maintained in:

  • docs/decisions/authorship-evidence.md — architectural choices and rejected alternatives
  • Commit history — decision rationale in commit messages
  • This file — licensing choices and their reasons

Anthropic plan tier ​

VERA operates on the Anthropic Consumer (Pro) plan. Under Anthropic's Terms of Service, outputs generated via the API are assigned to the account holder. The Pro tier provides narrower copyright-infringement indemnification than the Commercial API or Enterprise tiers; upgrading should be evaluated as VERA scales. Neither tier indemnifies against GPL contamination from training data — this risk is tracked in NOTICE.

Contributor Licence Agreement ​

Not required. VERA is single-author. If external contributors are ever added, a CLA must be in place before the first external contribution is merged, to ensure talktalkmake holds all rights and can relicence without restriction.

Dependency Licence Policy ​

All dependencies must use permissive open-source licences (MIT, Apache-2.0, ISC, BSD-2-Clause, or equivalent). No GPL, AGPL, LGPL, EUPL, or CDDL dependency may be added to package.json without an explicit decision record here. The dependency audit in NOTICE must be updated when dependencies change.

Automated licence scanning (FOSSA, Snyk Open Source, or equivalent) should be integrated into CI. See issue #551.

Trademark ​

"VERA" and "getvera.site" are not formally registered trademarks as of 2026-05-03. Formal registration should be evaluated once the product reaches commercial scale. Until then, the copyright notice in LICENSE and the NOTICE file are the primary IP protections.

Review Cadence ​

This document should be reviewed:

  • Before any new funding or acquisition conversation
  • Before adding the first external contributor
  • When the Anthropic plan tier changes
  • When any new dependency is added with an unusual licence