Project
License
Source-available, for private use. What that permits.
Hanterill is source-available for private, non-commercial use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This page is the plain-language summary. The full legal text is what counts.
Free for private use, and staying that way#
Hanterill costs nothing to own and use, and the project intends to keep it that way. There is no paid tier, no subscription, no account and no trial. No diagnostic feature is held behind one: what the downloads contain is everything the app can do.
Nothing changes in a later version. A future release will not introduce a paid tier, move a function behind one, or require an account to keep using what already works.
The one thing the license separates out is commercial use, and it exists in the open rather than as a loophole: a workshop or service provider that wants to bill for this work can ask for a commercial licence. That option is there so private owners never have to pay for it, and it does not affect you if you are one.
What you may do#
- Read the source. The code is published so you can audit exactly what Hanterill sends to a car.
- Build and run it for any non-commercial purpose: your own diagnostics, research, education.
- Share it unmodified, keeping the attribution and the license notice intact.
What you may not do#
- Use it commercially. No resale, no paid support, no diagnostics-as-a-service, no use inside a business where the purpose is commercial advantage.
- Distribute modified versions. You may change the code for your own private use, but you may not publish or share a modified copy.
It is not open source#
"Source-available" and "open source" are different things. Hanterill is not released under an OSI-approved license, and it is not trying to be: the non-commercial and no-derivatives terms are deliberate.
Why this license#
Publishing the source lets any owner verify what the tool does to their car. Keeping it non-commercial and no-derivatives keeps the project focused on being one tool rather than a product family or a field of forks.
Contributions#
Contributions come in under the same license and are folded into the project itself. The most useful things to contribute are protocol captures, module maps, and decoder corrections. The repository has the details on how to submit them.
If you are unsure#
If you are not certain whether a use is permitted, ask in the project's discussions before relying on it. Nothing on this page is legal advice.