The Awesome License (TALv1)

A license designed specifically for vibe coders.

Free for personal, educational, and non-profit use. If you're making money with it — or a for-profit company is using it internally, even without selling it — you either open-source your project back, or you pay the original author. That's the whole deal.

➡️ Canonical license text: LICENSE.md

The vibe

Most permissive licenses (MIT, Apache) let anyone — including large companies — take your work, wrap it in a product, and sell it back to the world without ever owing you anything. Most copyleft licenses (GPL) are viral in ways that scare off a lot of casual and commercial use alike. TALv1 tries to land in between:

• Free is actually free — personal projects, learning, non-profits, open-source work: use it, no strings.
• Commercial use has a catch, not a wall — you're not blocked from using this commercially, you just have to either keep the ecosystem open (release your project under an OSI-approved open source license too) or compensate the original author.
• A beer is nice, but it's not a legal loophole — yes, there's a Beerware clause. No, buying the author a beer does not satisfy Section 2 if you're running a business on their code.

Is this "open source"?

No — it's source-available. The commercial-use restriction in Section 2 disqualifies it from the OSI's Open Source Definition, the same way licenses like the Business Source License or PolyForm Noncommercial aren't OSI-approved either. Be upfront about this distinction if you adopt TALv1 — don't call your project "open source" if it's TALv1-licensed; call it source-available.

How to adopt TALv1 for your own project

1. Copy LICENSE.md into your project's root as LICENSE.

2. Fill in [YEAR], [Your Name/Developer Alias], and [Your Email or Website] at the top.

3. Mention it in your README so people know what they're agreeing to before they dig into the full text — something like:

   This project is licensed under The Awesome License v1 (TALv1) — free for personal/non-profit use; commercial use requires either open-sourcing your project or a commercial agreement with the author. This is a source-available license, not OSI-approved open source.

Versioning

This repo is the canonical, versioned home of TALv1. If the license text is ever revised, it'll be tagged (v1.0, v1.1, ...) so existing projects can keep linking to the exact wording they originally adopted, even after later changes. See CHANGELOG.md.

Important if you adopt this license: keep the full text physically inside your own project's LICENSE file, not just a link back here. Links rot; a copy in your own repo doesn't.

Projects using TALv1

• reimburse-mate — personal expense reimbursement tracker (Flutter)

(Using TALv1 for your own project? Open a PR adding it to this list.)

FAQ

Does this cover code I depend on (npm packages, Flutter packages, etc.)? No. TALv1 only governs code you actually authored. Third-party dependencies keep their own licenses regardless of what license you put on your own code.

What counts as "revenue-generating"? Paid apps, SaaS, in-app purchases, ad-supported apps, and — importantly — internal use by a for-profit company even if the software itself is never sold or exposed to end users. A hobby project with a "buy me a coffee" link and no real income isn't the target here; use good judgment, and when in doubt, ask the author (Option B exists for exactly this kind of conversation).

What if I violate Section 2? Per Section 5 (Termination), your license terminates automatically. Compliance can be restored by satisfying Option A or B retroactively, or by reaching a separate written agreement with the author.