Terms of Service

1. Who we are

licensegate (the “service”) is the command-line tool, this website at licensegate.org and the paid reports and plans offered here. Paid products are sold by MenuNode LLC, which is the name you will see at checkout and on your card statement. “We” and “us” mean MenuNode LLC. “You” means the person or company using the service. If you use it for a company, you confirm you may accept these terms on its behalf.

2. Not legal advice

licensegate produces an inventory of the open source licences declared by your dependencies, and a risk flag based on how you say you ship your software. It does not give a legal opinion, and nothing in the tool, a report or this website is legal advice. Using it does not create a lawyer–client relationship with anyone. Words like “ok”, “review” and “block” describe how a licence category is commonly treated for a shipping mode. They do not say that your product complies with any licence or law. For a decision with money or liability at stake, ask a lawyer who handles open source.

3. How results are produced, and their limits

• Results come from what package authors declare (the license field, SPDX expressions and LICENSE files) and from the lockfile or installed packages on your machine. Those declarations can be missing, wrong or out of date, and a package can include code under other licences that it doesn’t declare.
• We map licences to categories and categories to shipping modes using common readings of those licences. Grey areas, such as how a library is linked or bundled, plug-ins, dual licensing and licence exceptions, are marked review on purpose. A person has to look at them.
• A result describes your project at the moment you run the tool. It says nothing about later versions, other branches or code you didn’t scan.

4. The free command-line tool

The CLI is published under the MIT licence; the licence text ships with the package. It runs on your computer and sends nothing to us, so your code, lockfile and results stay with you. You may use it in any project, including commercial ones and CI pipelines.

5. Paid reports and the verification seal

• A paid report is a document generated from your project by the CLI. You may share it with anyone, for example a buyer, client, auditor or security team.
• To seal a report, the CLI sends us only cryptographic hashes (of the lockfile and of the report) plus summary counts. It never sends source code, package lists or file contents. We sign those hashes with our key and keep them so anyone can check the seal at licensegate.org.
• What the seal proves: that the report was generated by a given version of licensegate, on a given date, and hasn’t been changed since. What it does not prove: that the report is correct or complete, that the lockfile matches the code actually shipped, or that the project complies with any licence. Anyone relying on a report can run the free CLI on the code they receive to check it.
• You may not alter a sealed report and present it as sealed, or present a report as a legal opinion or a certification by us.

6. Prices, payment and taxes

Prices are shown in US dollars before you pay. Payments are processed by Stripe; we never see your full card number. Prices don’t include taxes unless stated; where the law requires it, sales tax or VAT is added at checkout. One-time purchases don’t renew. An annual plan, if you buy one, gives access for 12 months and doesn’t renew unless you pay again.

7. Refunds

If a paid report or plan doesn’t work as described, or you can’t generate the report you paid for, write to us within 14 days of the purchase and we’ll fix it or refund you in full. If you’re a consumer, this doesn’t limit any right to withdraw or get a refund that the law of your country gives you.

8. Acceptable use

Don’t use the service to break the law or anyone’s rights, to overload or attack licensegate.org, to get around limits or payments, or to pass off our reports or seal as something they are not (see sections 2 and 5). We may block access that breaks these rules.

9. No warranty

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy of results and non-infringement. We don’t promise that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that every licence will be identified correctly.

10. Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, we aren’t liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, or for lost profits, revenue, data, deals or business opportunities, arising from the service or from decisions based on its results. This includes the purchase or sale of a business or the release of a product. Our total liability for any claim related to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or US$50 if you paid nothing. Some laws don’t allow these limits. Where they don’t, the limits apply only as far as permitted.

11. Changes and ending

We may change the service or these terms. If a change matters, we’ll update the date at the top. Changes never take away a report or plan you have already paid for during the period you paid for. You can stop using the service at any time. Sealed reports stay verifiable for at least 3 years after they are sealed.

12. Privacy

How the website measures visits, and what the CLI does not collect, is explained in the Privacy page.

13. Contact

Questions, refunds and notices: namesheets.studio@proton.me.