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What the licence covers

This file exists so nobody has to guess. It explains what our MIT LICENSE does and does not reach, and it is written to be read by someone deciding whether they can use our work — not by a lawyer.

The short answer

Everything in this repository is MIT. One LICENSE file at the root, no per-directory licences, no per-file headers. If it is in the tree, MIT covers it.

That includes the parts people most often assume are held back:

  • All resume and cover letter templates.
  • All portfolio templates, including the ones we charge for on the hosted service — Nimbus and Cipher as well as Signal and Atelier.
  • The ATS scoring engine, the document renderer, and the export pipeline.
  • The marketing site, the studio, the server, and the shared packages.

MIT grants you the right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell all of it. There is no non-commercial carve-out and no field-of-use restriction, because MIT has neither.

What is not covered

Our brand. The VeriWorkly name, wordmark, logo, and brand assets are trademarks and MIT does not license trademarks. See TRADEMARK.md for the detail and for what to change when you fork.

Our hosted service. Using veriworkly.com and app.veriworkly.com is governed by the Terms of Service, not by MIT. The licence gives you rights in the code; it does not give you rights over our servers, our database, or another user's account.

Our runtime AI configuration. Model selection and prompt policy resolve at runtime from a private configuration and are not in this repository. The code that consumes them is MIT; the values are not published. This is why we describe the project as open-core rather than fully open-source — the distinction is real and we would rather name it than blur it.

Third-party dependencies. Each carries its own licence. npm ls and the lockfile are the authority, not this file.

Paid features and open source are not in tension

A fair question: if the templates are MIT, what are people paying for?

They are paying for the hosted service — publishing, a subdomain, analytics, AI credits, the badge removed. Not for access to the design. You can take Nimbus, self-host it, and never pay us anything, and that is a deliberate consequence of the licence rather than an oversight in it.

If we ever change this

Two things would stay true, and we are writing them down now so they are on the record:

  1. Relicensing is not retroactive. Anyone who has obtained a version under MIT keeps MIT rights in that version forever. We could change the licence going forward; we could not claw back what is already published.

  2. We may not be able to relicense at all. Contributions from other people are their copyright, licensed inbound under MIT by repository convention. Changing the licence would need every contributor's permission or an audit removing their work. The DCO sign-off in CONTRIBUTING.md fixes provenance from now on; it does not retroactively fix what is already merged.

If we ever move a template out of the open-source tree, it applies to versions published after the move. Nothing already released stops being MIT.

Questions

Open a discussion, or email grievance@veriworkly.com. If something here is ambiguous that is our bug, and we would like to fix the wording.