Licensing

Seer is dual-licensed: AGPL-3.0-or-later, with a paid commercial licence available for anyone who needs an exemption from the AGPL’s source-sharing requirement.

Why copyleft, specifically

This is not about limiting who gets to use the framework. It is about what kind of ecosystem a tool like this one should produce.

Seer exists to reverse-engineer other people’s work — to take a shipped game’s data files apart, understand formats their authors never documented, and rebuild them as something you can read and run. That work is only possible because decades of people in the preservation and romhacking communities published what they found instead of keeping it. Every solved format this framework builds on was somebody’s unpaid, shared effort.

A framework built on that foundation ought to keep feeding it. So the licence is chosen to make the give-back the default: if you build on Seer, your work stays open too, and the next person gets the same head start you did.

That is a principle, not a trap. If the copyleft genuinely doesn’t fit what you’re doing, there is a commercial option below and we would rather have that conversation than have you quietly walk away.

Option 1 — AGPL-3.0-or-later (free)

Use, modify and distribute Seer freely for personal, educational or open-source work.

The AGPL’s distinguishing term matters here: it extends copyleft to network use. If you build a web application or hosted service on Seer, you must make your application’s complete source available under the AGPL to its users — not only if you ship them a binary. For a browser-based framework, that is the case that actually comes up.

The full text is in LICENSE at the repository root, and ships inside every published package.

Option 2 — Commercial licence (paid)

If you want to build a proprietary, closed-source product or SaaS platform on Seer, a commercial licence waives the AGPL’s source-sharing requirement and lets your codebase stay private.

What we are really after is one of two outcomes: your improvements and format work come back upstream where everyone benefits, or the exemption is paid for. Either is fine. Simple flat-fee and subscription terms are available, and custom terms are negotiable.

To enquire: email dr.shaid@gmail.com with the subject line [Commercial License Request - Project Name].

Which one applies to you

What you’re doing	Licence
Personal project, research, learning	AGPL — nothing to do
Open-source project, released under AGPL-compatible terms	AGPL — nothing to do
Internal tool, never exposed over a network	AGPL — nothing to do
Public web app or hosted service, source published	AGPL — nothing to do
Public web app or hosted service, source kept private	Commercial
Proprietary product distributed to customers	Commercial

If you’re unsure, ask. Getting this wrong by accident helps nobody.

Third-party code

@seer-project/tracker contains a TypeScript port of the Micromod JavaScript ProTracker replay engine by Martin Cameron, used under the BSD 3-Clause licence. That licence is permissive, so the port can be redistributed under Seer’s own terms — but its copyright notice must be retained in any redistribution, including under a commercial licence. The full notice ships with that package as THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md.

What this licence does not cover

Seer ships no game data, and neither should anything built with it. The framework is tooling: it reads files you already legally own. Original game assets, disk images and executables are the copyright of their respective owners, are not distributable under any licence offered here, and are excluded from every published package by design.