End User Licence Agreement

Hidra

Version 1.0

Hidra, its source code, its interface and its name are the property of the licensor. Nothing in this agreement transfers ownership of any of it. You are being given permission to use the software on the terms below, and nothing more.

This agreement is between you and Nathan Meirion Roberts (ABN 78 595 577 915) ("we", "us"). It covers the Hidra software, in every edition, on every platform.

You are asked to accept this the first time you run Hidra, and it must be accepted before the application can be used. Declining closes it. If you do not accept it, delete any copy you hold.

1. What Hidra is, and what that means for you

This section is not boilerplate. Hidra works differently from the chat applications this kind of agreement is usually written about, and the differences change what we can and cannot do for you. Read this section even if you read nothing else.

There is no server. We do not operate a service. We run no infrastructure that your messages pass through, and we hold no copy of anything you send. A "server" in Hidra is a document that every member holds a complete copy of, on their own machine, and replicas reconcile directly with each other. When you send a message it goes from your computer to the computers of the people in that server. It does not come to us, because there is no us for it to come to.

Your machine carries other people's data. Being a member of a server means your computer stores a complete copy of that server — its messages, its files, its history — and relays that data to other members. This uses your disk, your bandwidth and your electricity. You agree to this by joining a server. If that is not acceptable to you, do not join one.

An invite hands over a full copy. An invite grants write capability for the whole document. Anyone who has it can join, gets a complete copy of everything in that server, and can write to it. There is no "read-only" invite and no way to take a copy back once it has been made. Treat an invite as you would treat a key.

We cannot delete anything. Once you have sent something, copies of it exist on other people's machines. We cannot reach those copies, and neither can you. Deleting a message removes it from your replica and asks the others to do the same; it is a request to software other people control, not a guarantee.

We cannot moderate anything. We cannot see what is in any server, so we cannot remove content, suspend anyone, or intervene in a dispute. There is no report button that reaches us, because there is nowhere for a report to go. If somebody in a server behaves badly, the remedies available are the ones the members have: remove them, leave, or go to the police.

We cannot recover your account. There is no account. Your identity is a keypair on your machine. If you lose it, we cannot restore it, reissue it, or prove to anyone that you were you. Keep a backup.

2. Licence

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use Hidra on devices you own or control, for the edition you hold, subject to this agreement.

The software is licensed, not sold. We keep all right, title and interest in it, including all intellectual property rights.

3. Editions

Hidra is offered in more than one edition. The free edition has features disabled or limited; the paid edition does not. Which features differ is stated where the software is offered and may change between releases.

Restrictions attach to your client, not to the servers you join. A free edition user is a full member of any server they join, including one created with a paid edition: they hold the same complete copy and relay the same data as anyone else. Features disabled in the free edition are disabled on that person's own client only.

A paid licence is for one person. You may install it on devices you own or control. You may not share, resell, sublicense or publish a licence key.

4. Pre-release and beta builds

A build marked beta, preview or pre-release is provided for testing. It is incomplete, it will contain defects, and it may lose your data. Do not use it for anything you cannot afford to lose. Features present in a beta may be removed, changed or moved between editions before release.

Beta builds may have diagnostic logging permanently enabled. What that logging records, and where it goes, is described in the privacy statement.

5. What you may not do

You may not:

copy, modify, translate or create derivative works of the software, except as this agreement or a law that cannot be contracted out of permits;
reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except to the extent section 47D of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) permits for interoperability, or another non-excludable law allows;
remove, obscure or alter any notice of copyright, trade mark or licence;
circumvent, disable or interfere with any licensing, activation or edition check, or use a key you are not entitled to;
rent, lease, lend, sell, sublicense or distribute the software;
use it to break the law, or to help anybody else do so.

6. What you do with it is yours

You are responsible for everything you send, store, share or relay using Hidra, and for what you join. You warrant that your use will comply with the laws that apply to you — including, in Australia, the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth), and the law of your state or territory.

We do not review, approve, endorse or have any knowledge of what passes through Hidra. You indemnify us against claims arising from what you do with it, except to the extent the claim arises from our own breach of this agreement or from something the law does not let us exclude.

7. Privacy

Because there is no server, we do not collect, hold or process the content of your communications. We cannot: it never reaches us.

What we do collect — if anything — is limited to what you choose to send us, such as a bug report or diagnostic log you submit yourself. This is set out in the privacy statement that ships with the software, which forms part of this agreement.

Diagnostic material from a chat application is sensitive even when it contains no message text: it can show who you spoke to and when. Read the privacy statement before submitting any.

8. Third-party components

Hidra includes software from others, under their own licences, listed in THIRD-PARTY.md. Those licences govern those components. Where one of them gives you a right that this agreement does not, that licence prevails for that component.

9. Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law

This section prevails over anything else in this agreement.

Our goods and services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law (Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth)).

For a major failure you are entitled to:

a replacement or refund, and
compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage.

You are also entitled to have the goods repaired or replaced if they are not of acceptable quality and the failure does not amount to a major failure.

Nothing in this agreement excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, warranty, right or remedy that the Australian Consumer Law or any other law confers on you and that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted or modified. To the extent any term of this agreement would do so, that term does not apply.

10. Warranties, and their limits

Subject entirely to section 9, and to the extent the law permits:

The software is provided "as is". We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for any particular purpose, or that it will reach any particular person, or that a message will arrive, or that data will survive. Hidra depends on peer-to-peer networking that we do not operate and cannot control; delivery depends on other people's machines being reachable.

We do not warrant that anything you send is private from the people you send it to, nor that a person who receives it will not keep, copy or republish it. Presence features, including appearing offline, are a request made of other people's software. An ordinary client honours them. Software modified by somebody else need not, and we cannot make it.

11. Liability

Subject entirely to section 9, and to the extent the law permits:

Our total liability to you, for everything arising out of or in connection with this agreement or the software, is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for the software in the twelve months before the claim, or (at our option) resupplying the software or paying the cost of having it resupplied.

We are not liable for loss of data, loss of profit, loss of opportunity, or any indirect or consequential loss, however caused.

12. Term, and ending it

This agreement runs until it ends.

You may end it at any time by uninstalling the software and deleting every copy you hold.

We may end it if you materially breach it and do not fix the breach within 14 days of us asking you to. On ending, your licence stops and you must delete every copy. Nothing in this section affects a refund right you have under the Australian Consumer Law.

Ending this agreement does not reach the copies of your data held by other members of servers you joined. Nothing can. See section 1.

13. Updates

We may offer updates. We are not obliged to. An update may add, change or remove features. Where an update is offered on different terms, those terms will be shown before it is installed.

14. Changes to this agreement

We may change this agreement for future versions of the software. Changes do not apply retrospectively to a version you already hold: the agreement you accepted when you installed it continues to govern that copy.

15. Governing law

This agreement is governed by the law of Western Australia, Australia. You and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of that place and of the Commonwealth of Australia.

If you are a consumer in another country, this does not take away any protection your own law gives you that cannot be contracted out of.

16. Our name and our logo

Hidra™ and the three-tin-cans logo are trade marks of Nathan Meirion Roberts; the name is the subject of Australian trade mark application No. 2699597, in Class 9, which is pending. Nothing in this agreement gives you any right to use either.

In particular, you may not:

use the name Hidra, or the logo, for your own software, service or business;
use either in a way that suggests we made, endorsed, sponsored or checked something we did not;
register either, or anything confusingly similar to either, as a trade mark, business name or domain name;
remove or alter either where they appear in the software.

You may use the name to refer to this software truthfully — saying that something works with Hidra, writing about it, reviewing it, or naming it in a list. That is ordinary descriptive use and this clause does not touch it.

A modified copy must not carry our name or our logo. This is not only a trade mark point: a build we did not make, wearing our name, is one whose behaviour gets attributed to us.

17. General

If any term is found unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues.

A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it.

This agreement, the licence in LICENCE.md, and the privacy statement are the whole agreement between us about the software.

18. Contact

hidra.chat@proton.me