I grew up using free software. I still do. My machine runs Linux. My editor is a descendant of something a 22-year-old PhD student wrote in 1976. The web I work on started as a CERN weekend project. I owe a visible portion of my career to people who wrote code and gave it away.
So I want to be clear about why Smartopol, which feels like software that should be on a git forge with an MIT license at the top, is not.
§ 01 · the pattern
Three weeks ago, on the last day of March, Anthropic — the company behind Claude — accidentally shipped the source of their own agent, Claude Code, inside an npm package. A sixty-megabyte source map. Roughly half a million lines of TypeScript. By the next morning, a developer had rewritten the core in Python and pushed it to GitHub as Claw Code. Within a week it had passed a hundred thousand stars. Anthropic is a fourteen-billion-dollar company with a legal department, and they have spent the time since issuing DMCA takedowns against mirrors.
I am one person.
The Claude Code leak is not an anomaly. It is the accidental version of what happens on purpose, regularly, to software that matters. In August 2023, HashiCorp moved Terraform to the Business Source License; within weeks a coalition had forked the last open version into OpenTofu and brought it under the Linux Foundation. In March 2024, Redis switched to SSPL; within weeks Amazon, Google and the Linux Foundation had forked it into Valkey, and Amazon made Valkey the default in ElastiCache. The pattern is old and it isn't about quality. The moment a piece of software begins to matter, someone with more resources than its author takes the source and repackages it. If the author is a company, they raise defences. If the author is one person, they disappear.
§ 02 · then why closed
Because I want the story of Smartopol to be "the person who wrote it is still the one maintaining it" for as long as possible, and a permissive license is the accelerant that makes that story end early. A VC-backed fork with a marketing team can out-ship a solo author on everything except the software itself. If I cannot keep the software itself, I lose — and so does everyone who chose Smartopol on the assumption that choosing it meant choosing me.
The license isn't there to keep you from reading the code. The license is there to keep someone else from taking it.
§ 03 · what you get anyway
You get almost everything open source is supposed to give you:
▸ what's promised
- runs entirely on your machine
- no mandatory telemetry
- no calls home
- free to use, forever
- your data stays yours, on your disk
- uninstall = delete a folder
- readable config, readable logs
- no vendor account, no SaaS dependency
▸ what's different
- source is not on a public forge
- you can't fork and rebrand it
- you can't relicense it
- you can't rip out the hard parts
- source review under NDA on request
- for compliance teams & security researchers: same, free
If you need to audit the code — because your employer requires it, or because you want to verify that the sandbox really sandboxes — email me and tell me who you are. If the request fits, we sign a simple NDA, no lawyers, no money. You read. I answer questions. Nobody's source code ends up on GitHub. I have done this for three organisations already — and declined requests from others. It is not a form, it is a conversation.
§ 04 · the VLC test
VLC is open source. Great piece of software. But pick something a user cares about: do they know what license VLC uses? No. Do they care that they can recompile it? No. They care that it plays their videos, doesn't show ads, doesn't phone home, and was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow.
That is the test. "Feels like VLC" means: it works, it is free, it respects you, and nobody is trying to upsell you a premium version of playing a file.
A closed license can meet that test. An open license can fail it (ask anyone who has run into a project with a rug-pull relicense). What matters is the behaviour the user experiences, year after year. I intend for Smartopol to behave like the version of VLC you remember.
§ 05 · come help. just don't fork.
A closed license protects the code. It doesn't protect me from needing help, and I do. Smartopol is a large project for one person, and there are parts of it — community, support, docs, verticals I don't understand — that I am not the best person for, and that deserve someone who is.
So the community is open even if the source isn't. If any of this sounds like you, write to me.
▸ help wanted
- community leads — run a Discord, set the tone, answer questions
- early testers — ongoing feedback while the product is still forming
- docs & video — people who can explain a thing well
- contributors under NDA — same terms as the NDA'd source review: you write code, you can't fork it
- vertical partners — lawyers, clinicians, researchers, writers — people who know a domain I don't
▸ what's on offer
- real influence on the product while it's still malleable
- credit where credit is due — names on the page, not in a footer
- volunteer now; paid later, when the company has revenue to share — in that order, not the other way around
- short lines. I read every email. I answer.
"Open source" means anyone can clone. That is not what this project wants. What it wants is people around it — reading it, testing it, arguing with it, shaping it. The license protects the thing. It was never meant to keep the people out.
§ 06 · the commitments, in writing
So I'm writing them down. Not as marketing copy — as the list I re-read every year to check whether the project is still the project I intended it to be.
1. The binary is free. For anyone. Forever. No downgrade, no paywall, no seat count.
2. No mandatory telemetry. Ever. Opt-in, level-gated, inspectable when you turn it on.
3. Your memory is yours. Stored locally, in a format I document. Exportable in one command. Importable into other tools.
4. No dark patterns. No "upgrade to Pro to get memory." No holding your data to sell you a plan.
5. If Smartopol LLC folds, the last shipped binary gets a perpetual license and offline activation. This is written into the company's operating agreement.
6. If any of these change, I owe you a letter like this one explaining why.
§ 07 · what happens if I'm wrong
If closed-source turns out to be the wrong call — if it genuinely holds the project back, if the community benefit of an open repo outweighs the fork risk, if my math is bad — I will say so. And then the license changes. That is not a threat; it is the last reason I'm writing this down. If I ever open the source, it will be because it made things better for the users, not because a blog post shamed me into it.
Until then: the binary is free, the license is fair, the source is readable under NDA for anyone who needs to audit, and the commitments above are the ones I re-read every spring.
Thanks for getting this far. If you want to ask anything the letter didn't cover, I still read every email that arrives at the address below.