Licensing and support
The Songlark toolchain is not free software; commercial use requires a licence which can be purchased from us (Songlark Automata). All licensing costs go directly towards development and support.
We recommend that commercial entities take out an Annual Support Contract which includes one hundred (100) hours of support and directed development, and provides access to one year of updates. Although the contract includes a year of software updates, the licence grants perpetual use of any version up to and including the latest version when the licence expires. This perpetual licence includes access to the Songlark toolchain source code, and commercial users are able to modify and extend the toolchain as necessary. (However, commercial users are not able to re-distribute the toolchain other than for internal purposes; they may not re-license it or sell it without an explicit agreement with Songlark Automata.)
Our core values of transparency and extensibility ensure that users will always have access to the source code. The current prerelease source code is publicly available for non-commercial use including research, education and evaluation. We believe that open development and honest discussion is necessary to achieve the ultimate aim of a safer world. In the future, it might be feasible to move to a completely free open-source model while ensuring funding for further development, but for now a source-available proprietary licence is the best trade-off we can make.
Annual Support Contract
The Annual Support Contract is a combination of a perpetual software licence, with one year of updates, along with one hundred hours of support or development. By combining the licence with support and development hours, this model ensures that all licensing costs are fed back into helping the user and developing a product that is most useful to them. As the licence is perpetual, and source is included and extensible, the user is under no obligation to renew their contract and can continue to use the software without updates.
Support and development hours can be allocated as the user wishes. They can be used for consulting on application-specific issues, debugging issues in the toolchain itself, and implementing specific features and extensions as directed by the user.
After all support and development hours are depleted, support and application-specific development can be performed as standard hourly consulting, while extensions to the toolchain itself are considered special works as Songlark Automata retains the copyright. See consulting for more information.
For more information, please contact sales@songlark.net.
Non-commercial use
The Songlark toolchain can be used for personal and non-commercial use, including research, education and evaluation. In this context the term "evaluation" refers to testing software to check whether it is fit-for-purpose. Evaluation use includes those inside a commercial organisation trying out the toolchain.
Some use-cases might not be entirely clear, such as artistic work where there are grants involved. If you have an interesting use-case for the Songlark toolchain which is a bit unclear, feel free to contact noncommercial@songlark.net to work out a special-case.