THE LICENCE, IN PLAIN ENGLISH
=============================

Project:  VeilVoice
Licence:  GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later)
Full text: LICENSE.txt in this folder, and
          https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt

This file is a summary written for people, not a legal document. Where this
summary and LICENSE.txt disagree, LICENSE.txt is the licence.


WHAT YOU CAN DO, FREELY
-----------------------

  - Run it, for any purpose whatsoever. There is no restriction on who you are
    or what you use it for.
  - Read every line of it. Study how it works.
  - Copy it, mirror it, keep an offline copy, put it on a USB stick.
  - Change it. Fork it. Build something else out of it.
  - Redistribute it, including selling it or using it commercially.
  - Use it at work, in a newsroom, in a clinic, in a class, in a shelter.

You do not need to ask permission for any of that. That is the point of
publishing it.


THE CONDITIONS
--------------

  Share the source   If you give someone the program, you must also make the
                     corresponding source code available to them -- including
                     any changes you made.

  Same licence       Derivative works are released under the GPL too, so the
                     next person gets the same freedoms you got.

  Keep the notices   Leave the copyright and licence notices in place.

  State changes      If you modified it, say so, so nobody blames the original
                     for your edits.


WHY THIS LICENCE, AND NOT A NON-COMMERCIAL ONE
----------------------------------------------

A privacy tool is only as trustworthy as it is inspectable. If you cannot read
the code, you are taking on faith that a program which processes your voice does
what it claims -- and "trust me" is exactly the thing this project exists to
avoid needing.

So the licence is deliberately a free-software one, with no NonCommercial clause
and no field-of-use restriction. A "you may not use this commercially" rule
would sound protective, but it would mean a newsroom could not use it in paid
work, a security consultancy could not deploy it for a client, and no Linux
distribution could package it. That is a lot of people locked out in exchange
for very little.

Copyleft does the protective work instead. Anyone may build a business on
VeilVoice; nobody may take it, close the source, and hand users a version they
can no longer inspect. The freedom travels with the code.


WHAT THE LICENCE DOES NOT COVER
-------------------------------

The licence says what you may do with the work. It says nothing about whether
the work is fit for your purpose, and it disclaims warranty entirely -- see
sections 15 and 16 of LICENSE.txt, restated in ordinary words in
LEGAL-WAIVER.txt.

In particular, read section 4 of the waiver, which sets out plainly what this
software does *not* do. The most important line: it does not hide what you said,
only who said it. That is a deliberate design choice, not a shortcoming, and
misunderstanding it is the one mistake that could actually hurt someone.


IF YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING THE LICENCE DOES NOT ALLOW
------------------------------------------------------

Ask. Open an issue on the repository and explain what you have in mind. In
practice the GPL already permits almost everything anyone reasonably wants; the
usual reason to ask is wanting to distribute a modified version without
publishing the modifications, and that is the one thing the licence is there to
prevent.