MY THOUGHT SAFE — LICENSE

Copyright © 2026 Tyson Treasure ("the author"). All rights reserved.

This is the agreement under which you may use My Thought Safe. It is written to be read, not to be
skipped. If you do not accept it, do not install or use the software.

In short: it costs nothing, you may use it for anything, you may take it apart to check that it does
what it claims — but please send people to the official download rather than passing copies around,
and there is no warranty of any kind.


1. WHAT YOU MAY DO

You are granted a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to install and use My Thought Safe,
free of charge, for any purpose. That includes personal use, professional use, use inside a company
or other organization, and use in the course of a business. There is no distinction between a
personal and a commercial user, and there is no charge for either.

You may install it on as many devices as you use, and you may keep copies for your own use —
including on removable media, which is what the portable build and the Linux AppImage are for. A
copy you carry between your own machines is your copy.

You may make backups of the software and of your own vaults.


2. WHAT YOU MAY NOT DO

You may not distribute the software to other people. That means: do not host it for download, do not
mirror it, do not include it in a bundle or a software repository, and do not give copies to others.
Send people to the official download instead.

The reason is verification, not money. There is exactly one place this software comes from, so the
hash you check a download against means something. A copy from anywhere else could be anything, and
the person who ends up trusting it with their diary would have no way to tell.

You may not sell the software, rent it, or charge anyone for access to it.

You may not remove or alter the copyright notices, the license, or the third-party notices, and you
may not distribute a modified version.

You may not use the name "My Thought Safe", or its logo, to identify anything you did not receive
from its author. Nothing in this license grants you any trademark rights.


3. EXAMINING THE SOFTWARE

You may reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, instrument, debug, fuzz, packet-capture and
otherwise examine the software, by any means, for the purpose of understanding what it does or of
finding faults in it. You may publish what you find, including anything unflattering, without asking
permission first.

This is stated as an explicit permission because it is exactly the opposite of what most licenses
say, and because a program that asks you to trust it with your private thoughts has no business
forbidding you from checking whether it deserves that trust. If you find that it does not do what it
claims, saying so publicly is a service, not a breach of this agreement.

Nothing in this section grants you any right to redistribute the software or any part of it,
modified or otherwise, or to use what you learn to produce a competing copy of it.


4. THE SOURCE CODE IS NOT PROVIDED

My Thought Safe's own source code is not distributed and remains the property of its author. No
right to it is granted here, expressly or by implication. Section 3 permits you to examine what you
have been given; it does not entitle you to what you have not.

The third-party components distributed with the software are a separate matter and are governed by
their own licenses — see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md, which travels with every copy. Where those licenses
grant you rights that this one does not, theirs apply to their components.


5. YOUR DATA

The software stores your data on your own device, in vault files you control, encrypted with keys
derived from factors only you hold. It does not transmit anything anywhere.

The author has no access to your data, and no ability to recover it. There is no backdoor, no
recovery key, and no reset. If you lose the passphrase or hardware key that opens a vault, that
vault and everything in it are gone permanently. This is a deliberate design decision and it is the
whole point; it is also the single most likely way you will lose your own writing. Keep backups, and
keep your factors safe.


6. NO WARRANTY

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT
NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND
NON-INFRINGEMENT.

The author does not warrant that the software is free of defects, that it will meet your
requirements, that it will operate without interruption, or that any defect will be corrected. No
security software can promise it has no flaws, and this one does not. The security claims published
with it describe what has been tested and by whom; they are not a guarantee, and no external audit
has been performed.

No advice or information, whether spoken or written, obtained from the author creates any warranty.


7. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT,
INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR ITS USE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION LOSS OF DATA, LOSS OF PRIVACY, LOSS OF
PROFITS, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT
LIABILITY OR OTHERWISE, AND EVEN IF THE AUTHOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

The software is provided free of charge, and this allocation of risk is a condition of it being
provided at all.


8. NO OBLIGATION TO SUPPORT

Nothing here obliges the author to provide support, updates, fixes, or future versions, or to keep
any particular feature working. The software contains no automatic updater and will not change
underneath you; a new version is one you choose to install.


9. CONSUMER RIGHTS

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain
liabilities. Where that is so, sections 6 and 7 apply only to the extent permitted, and any rights
you have under applicable consumer law are unaffected. Certain jurisdictions, including the European
Union and Australia, also grant rights to decompile software for interoperability that cannot be
signed away; section 3 grants more than those rights, not less.


10. TERMINATION

This license ends automatically if you breach it. On termination, stop using the software and delete
your copies of it. Your vaults are your own data and are unaffected — they remain readable by any
copy of the software you are entitled to use.

Sections 4, 6, 7 and 11 survive termination.


11. GENERAL

This is the entire agreement between you and the author concerning the software, and it replaces any
earlier understanding. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest remains in force.

A failure to enforce any part of this license is not a waiver of it.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, United States of America,
without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.


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My Thought Safe is distributed with third-party components under their own permissive licenses. See
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md for the full list, the license texts, and who to credit.
