Skip to content

Terms of Service

Usage & Licensing Policy

This project exists to support hobbyists, experimenters, educators, and volunteers

Everything provided here — the website, documentation, designs, tools, etc — is shared with the intention of helping people learn, explore, and contribute back to the community.

This page explains how the materials available through this site and the site itself may be used, the boundaries around commercial use, and the copyright and licensing terms.

Purpose

The goal of this policy is to keep the project:

  • Free for personal and volunteer use
  • Welcoming to hobbyists and learners
  • Protected from commercial exploitation
  • Sustainable for the community

This is not meant to police anyone — it is meant to preserve the spirit of the project.

Non-Commercial Use

All materials on this site are provided for personal, educational, and volunteer use only.

Use of the content, source code, designs, documentation, or tools for commercial, for-profit, or revenue-generating activities is not permitted unless you have received express written permission.

“Commercial use” includes any activity where you (or your organization) receive money, payment, compensation, sponsorship, or other financial benefit.

What Is Allowed

You may:

  • Use the site’s tools and designs for personal or hobbyist projects
  • Reproduce or share information for teaching, mentoring, or non-profit education
  • Recoup out-of-pocket expenses (e.g., components, shipping, replacement parts)
  • Build, assemble, or help others as a volunteer
  • Link to the site for informational or educational purposes
  • Share screenshots or small excerpts with attribution

These uses are in line with the project’s mission.

What Is Not Allowed

You may not:

  • Sell products or services derived from the materials here
  • Charge for labor, assembly, consulting, workshops, or support related to these materials
  • Integrate or embed the tools into a paid product or service
  • Redistribute the materials online or otherwise without permission
  • Use the site to support a commercial, paid, or revenue-generating workflow
  • Mirror, fork, or bundle the materials in any system intended for commercial gain or otherwise

If you are profiting while using resources from this site, that is not acceptable use.

Commercial Vendors / Third-Party Products

Commercial vendors may not rely on this site as a substitute for features or capabilities they do not provide.

This includes:

  • Directing paying customers to this site to perform tasks the vendor’s product cannot perform
  • Making this site part of their commercial instructions, troubleshooting, or support flow
  • Promoting or suggesting that this project is part of or affiliated with their offering
  • Integrating these tools into a paid ecosystem without permission

If you are a commercial entity and wish to reference or integrate with these tools, please see the Contact page for contact details.

The project is community-driven and volunteer-oriented; commercial reliance contradicts its mission.

Unless otherwise noted, all materials on this site are:

© 2023-forever Douglas Malnati. All rights reserved.

Unauthorized reproduction, redistribution, or commercial use is prohibited.

Exceptions

Explicitly, the pages on this site under /pro/telemetry are free to be linked to and referenced even by commercial sites, as these are the pages which specify interoperability between a great number of trackers.

The "Downloads" sections available on the site for the tracker, solar system, wind-o-matic, identify resources which are explicitly available for download/copy/redistribution.

Other Notices

Prior work

Earlier versions of this site did not include a standalone TOS page or visible copyright notices within the source code. This occasionally led to unauthorized copying, redistribution, and reuse of the site materials.

To avoid any confusion:

  • All content, code, and materials on this site — past and present — are protected by copyright from the moment they were created.
  • Copyright protection does not depend on whether a notice was displayed at the time.
  • No prior version of the site was ever licensed for copying, redistribution, or commercial use unless explicitly stated in writing.
  • Any unlicensed copies, local or remote, must be deleted and may not be reused or republished.

These clarifications are provided to ensure that all users understand the boundaries of permitted use going forward.