Terms and licences

The licence

dew is free software, released under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License. The full text is in the repository as LICENSE. That text is the agreement and this page is a summary of it, so where the two disagree the licence is what binds.

You may run it for any purpose, private or commercial, on as many machines as you like. You may read the source, change it, and pass it on. Nothing has to be registered, and there is nothing to pay.

What the AGPL asks in return is source. If you give somebody a copy of dew — modified or not — you must offer them the corresponding source under the same licence. If you run a modified version somewhere other people interact with it over a network, you must offer them that source too. That last clause is what makes it the Affero licence rather than the ordinary GPL.

The music you make with dew is yours. The licence covers the program, not its output, and dew claims nothing over a project file, a render or a score you write.

No warranty

dew is offered as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied — including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to its quality and performance is yours. Sections 15 and 16 of the licence are the binding wording.

It is a working prototype rather than a finished product. It can crash, and it can lose work that has not been saved. Do not put anything on it you would be sorry to lose, and keep your own copies.

JUCE

dew is built on JUCE 9, which is dual-licensed: a commercial licence, or the AGPLv3. dew takes the AGPL terms, which is why dew is itself AGPL.

Both licence texts travel inside every build. dew-LICENSE.txt, JUCE-LICENSE.md and THIRD_PARTY.md sit in the application bundle’s Resources on macOS and beside the binary on Windows and Linux, so somebody holding a copy has the terms without having to find this page.

What else is inside it

Two libraries: JUCE, and Catch2 under the Boost Software License 1.0, which the test binaries link and no shipped artefact contains. THIRD_PARTY.md in the repository is generated at build time from what was actually resolved, so it records the exact versions and commits rather than a claim about them.

LAME is neither bundled nor linked. MP3 export runs whatever lame is installed on your PATH as a separate process, under its own licence and on its own terms; without one, dew greys the option out and everything else works.

No typefaces and no sound files are redistributed. dew draws with the system typeface, its icons are drawn in code rather than shipped as images, and its wavetables are computed at load. A SoundFont you load is your own file and stays yours.

Unsigned builds

None of the published builds is signed by a paid developer certificate, so macOS and Windows will each stop the first launch. The download page says what each of them does and how to get past it. Every release also carries SHA256SUMS.txt and a Sigstore build attestation, which records the repository, the workflow and the commit a file was built from. The download page gives the two commands that check them.

What dew collects

Nothing. There is no telemetry, no crash reporting, no update check and no account. dew makes no network requests of its own; the one address it ever opens is the source repository, handed to your browser when you click through from the About window.

The MCP server is the only thing that listens, it is off until you switch it on, and it binds the loopback interface only, so no machine but your own can reach it. It validates the Origin header, so a page you are merely visiting cannot drive it either, and each client is named to you and approved by you before it can do anything.

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