Licensing

In plain English

Six ways an organisation can work with Imortek

Licensing is one of them, and it is the one this page goes on to explain in detail. Here are the other five first, because most people arrive with a problem rather than a legal question.

01

Technology deployment

Take something already built and put it to work where you are. The systems on this site are public, tested and documented, and each page says what its software does today and what it does not. If one of them fits, the work is installation, your own data, and the parts that only break under real conditions.

02

Commissioned development

These systems were built to be general. An operational requirement never is. Where something is close to what you need but not aimed at it, it can be adapted — a different data format, a model fitted to your problem, an interface built around how your people actually work. Scoped and quoted before any of it starts.

03

Research partnership

Some of this work is research and is labelled as research. Where an approach looks promising but is unproven, the honest way to settle it is to test it together: you bring the problem and the data, this side brings the implementation and the measurement. Findings are written down either way, negative ones included.

04

Put Imortek technology inside your own product or infrastructure. Everything here is AGPL-3.0+ by default, which suits open work but reaches into the code you build around it. A commercial licence removes that reach and the duty to publish your modifications. Per-project is the normal case. The rest of this page is the detail.

05

Investment

There is no team, no investor money to spend down and no growth plan behind this work, and the about page says so plainly. What money buys here is time and compute. The ParanoidBSD campaign is the public version of that ask — AUD 10,000, all-or-nothing, with every assumption behind the figure laid out and adjustable. For anything larger, email and say what interests you.

06

Technical evaluation

Test it against your own data before anyone signs anything. Beta access is free: no contract, no Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), no account. You send an email, you get the software and a short note on what would help most. If it falls over on your data, that is the result worth having, and it is the one that changes the software.

Not sure which of these you are after? Say what you are trying to do and roughly how big your organisation is. You will get a straight answer rather than a discovery call — including “that one is not ready for you yet” where that is the truth. Everything below is the licence detail sitting underneath all six.

Email about working together Test it first, free

Interactive

Which licence do you need?

Four questions. The answer is computed in your browser and nothing is recorded. This is a guide to the terms, not legal advice — the licence texts govern.

A decision flow: individuals, charities, education and organisations under AUD 50,000 take AGPL-3.0 or later at no cost; organisations at or above that threshold, or needing private modifications, take the commercial licence — **The whole decision, on one line.** The chooser below asks the same four questions and tells you which branch you are on.

licence chooser

Result

Answer the questions

The recommendation updates as you go.

What that means for you

A summary of the published terms. Where this page and the licence files in the repositories disagree, the licence files win.

The terms

Side by side

	AGPL-3.0+	Commercial licence
Cost	Free	Tiered by organisation size
Who it is for	Individuals, charities, education, organisations under AUD 50,000 a year	Everyone above that threshold
Use in a product	Yes	Yes
Modify the source	Yes	Yes
Must publish your modifications	Yes, under the same dual licence	No
Network use triggers source obligations	Yes — this is the “A” in AGPL	No
Research built on it	Must be open-sourced	No obligation
Attribution line required	Yes	Optional
Support	Best effort, via GitHub issues	Direct, by arrangement

Attribution

The line AGPL users must carry

In your about box, documentation, or footer:

Powered by Ideas, developed by Odin Loch.
Licensed under AGPL-3.0+.

The exception

Upstream code in ParanoidBSD is not relicensed

ParanoidBSD vendors two upstream trees and ports from both. hbsd/ stays under HardenedBSD’s and FreeBSD’s own terms; kde/ stays under KDE’s. Neither can be relicensed and Imortek does not claim to. Ported files under pbsd/ keep the upstream copyright header they inherited, and that header governs the file — it beats the per-path default.

LICENSING.md is the authoritative per-path map, and docs/PROVENANCE.md records which modules are ported and which are new PBSD work, so the boundary is checkable rather than asserted. New work — the capability nucleus, the tooling, the compositor and the Aero theme — carries the Imortek dual licence.

Three carve-outs the audit turned up. Twenty-two ported files inherit the original four-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence, whose advertising clause the AGPL cannot accept, so they are excluded from the AGPL grant and must not enter an AGPL binary. pbsd/zfs/ derives from OpenZFS, which is under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and has no compatibility route to the AGPL — ZFS stays a separate unmodified module. And the KDE-derived work is compatible only through the “or later” clause, so code under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 alone (GPL-2.0-only) must never enter the tree. All three are listed in NOTICES.md and enforced by a Continuous Integration (CI) check.

Per project

What each repository carries today

The catalogue is now on one licence. Every repository below carries AGPL-3.0+ with the commercial tier, and the last column records what each one was before, because a licence change is the kind of thing people deserve to be told about rather than have quietly swapped underneath them.

Project	Licence	Status	Note
Ideas — research shelf	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial	In place	—
RetDec Imortek	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial	In place	—
ARIA-INTEL	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial	In place	—
Cypha	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial	In place	was Creative Commons (CC) BY 4.0
MathScript	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial	In place	was unlicensed · `vendor/` excluded
AEGIS	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial	In place	was proprietary
SENTINEL	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial	In place	was MIT
Cell AI	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial	In place	was unlicensed
ParanoidBSD	AGPL-3.0+ / commercial for new work	Split, permanently	hbsd/ and kde/ excluded; per-file headers govern

If a repository’s LICENSE file disagrees with this table, the LICENSE file is what binds. Two things worth stating plainly about the change. Permissive licences are irrevocable for copies already distributed — anyone who received Cypha under CC BY 4.0, or SENTINEL under MIT, keeps those rights to that copy; the new terms govern this release onward. And three were not previously open at all: AEGIS, MathScript, and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) research log, Cell AI. For those the change grants rights rather than removing them.

Questions people actually ask

Before you email

We are a startup under AUD 50,000. Do we really pay nothing?

Correct — you use it under AGPL-3.0+ for free. The obligations still apply: publish your modifications under the same dual licence, keep the attribution line, and be aware that offering it over a network counts as distribution under AGPL. When you cross the threshold, talk to us then.

What does “network use triggers source obligations” actually mean?

The AGPL closes the gap the GPL leaves open. Under the GPL, running modified software as a web service is not distribution, so no source has to be released. The AGPL says that if users interact with your modified version over a network, they are entitled to its source. If you run a SaaS product on top of this software, that clause is the one to read carefully — and it is usually the reason organisations take a commercial licence.

How is the AUD 50,000 threshold measured?

Annual income of the organisation, not revenue attributable to the software. It is a deliberately low-friction test: if you are small enough that working it out is annoying, you are small enough to be on the free tier.

What do the commercial tiers cost?

Tiered by organisation size, quoted per enquiry. There is no published price list because the catalogue spans an operating system, a decompiler, a numerics library and an anonymity transport — and what you need from each differs enormously. Email with what you want to use and roughly how big you are, and you will get a number rather than a discovery call.

Can we get a licence for one project rather than all of them?

Yes. Per-project licences are the normal case; catalogue-wide is available if you want it.

Is any of this legal advice?

No. This page is a plain-language summary written by the author of the software, not a lawyer. The AGPL-3.0 text and the commercial licence agreement are what actually bind. If the distinction matters to your organisation, have your own counsel read them.

Email about a commercial licence Read the AGPL-3.0 text

Closest on this site

Free for almost everyone. Paid where it pays.

AGPL-3.0 or later

Commercial licence