Licence

1. Grant for personal use

Subject to these terms, KONG GROUP LLC grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use DCTL for personal, non-commercial purposes on machines you own or personally control, for an unlimited amount of data and an unlimited number of vaults.

No feature is withheld from the personal licence. The tool you get for free is the same tool commercial customers pay for.

2. What personal use means

Personal use covers managing your own data for your own non-commercial purposes.

• Backing up a personal photo, video or document library.
• Running DCTL in a homelab or on personal infrastructure.
• Personal archival, study, evaluation and experimentation.

Personal use does not cover any of the following, which require a commercial licence:

• Use by, for, or on behalf of a company, partnership, charity or government body.
• Use in support of revenue-generating activity, including freelance and contract work.
• Deployment on machines owned or administered by an employer or client.
• Use in production systems, CI pipelines or any service offered to third parties.

3. Commercial and enterprise licences

Commercial licences are issued per seat — per person who uses DCTL — and enterprise site licences remove seat counting entirely. Both are covered by a written agreement that takes precedence over this page where the two conflict. Contact [email protected] to obtain one.

4. Restrictions

Under every licence tier, you may not:

• Sell, sublicense, rent or redistribute DCTL, whether alone or bundled.
• Offer DCTL, or a derivative of it, as a hosted or managed service.
• Remove or obscure copyright, trademark or attribution notices.
• Reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except where that restriction is unenforceable under applicable law.

Reading the published source, and building it for your own permitted use, is expressly allowed and encouraged.

5. Your data remains yours

KONG GROUP LLC claims no ownership of, and receives no access to, any data you process with DCTL. DCTL performs no telemetry, sends no usage analytics, and requires no account or activation to run.

Vaults written by DCTL use a design-frozen, publicly specified format, and a dependency-free C99 reference decoder is published alongside it. Expiry, termination or non-renewal of a licence does not render your stored data unreadable, and nothing in this licence should be read as permitting us to make it so.

6. Pre-release status

DCTL is pre-1.0. Parts of it are complete and exercised; parts are not. The status table on this site and the project’s own status document describe the real state of the code. Keep independent copies of anything you cannot afford to lose.

7. No warranty

DCTL is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

8. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, KONG GROUP LLC shall not be liable for any claim, damages or other liability arising from or in connection with DCTL or its use, including any loss of data, loss of profits or business interruption. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid for the licence in the twelve months preceding the claim.

9. Termination

This licence terminates automatically if you breach its terms. On termination you must stop using DCTL and remove it from your systems. Your ability to read data you have already stored, using the published format specification and reference decoder, is not affected.

10. Governing law

This licence is governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.

11. Contact

Licensing questions: [email protected].