DCTL

DCTL is a product of KONG GROUP LLC, a United States limited liability company,
which owns it and licenses it. https://www.dctl.sh

Copyright 2026 KONG GROUP LLC. All rights reserved.

DCTL is source-available, not open source. Three grants apply, and which one
covers you depends on who you are and what the file is for. These paragraphs
summarise; the licence files govern.

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1. Noncommercial use — PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 (LICENSE.md)
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Free to use, modify and self-host for any noncommercial purpose: personal
study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, research and
experiment without anticipated commercial application.

Use by a charitable organization, educational institution, public research
organization, public safety or health organization, environmental protection
organization, or government institution is also a permitted purpose under this
licence, regardless of how that organization is funded.

Any commercial use requires a commercial licence. That includes use by a
business of any size, however small — there is no small-company exemption.

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2. Evaluating it — PolyForm Free Trial License 1.0.0 (LICENSE-FREE-TRIAL.md)
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Anyone, of any size, may use DCTL to evaluate whether it suits a particular
application for less than 32 consecutive calendar days.

This grant exists because deciding whether a tool is right for you should not
require a purchase order first. Past the trial window, commercial use needs a
commercial licence.

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3. Commercial use — a licence from KONG GROUP LLC
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Any use for or on behalf of a business, of any size, beyond the trial window in
(2), requires a commercial licence.

Commercial licensing, and any question about whether a particular use needs one,
goes to KONG GROUP LLC.

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The format and its reference decoder — Apache License 2.0
(LICENSE-Apache-2.0.txt)
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  crates/dctl-decode/FORMAT.md
  crates/dctl-decode/reference/

These are Apache 2.0, deliberately and separately from everything above, and
that grant is not limited by size, sector, purpose or time.

The reason is the promise the format makes. DCTL claims its objects will still
be readable in twenty years, and that claim is hollow if reading them requires
this tool, this company, or this company continuing to exist. The specification
and a working decoder therefore carry a permissive licence with an express
patent grant, so anyone may implement against the format, sell what they build,
fork it, and never ask permission.

If the grants above ever appear to conflict over one of these files, Apache 2.0
is the one that governs them.

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Third-party components
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Dependencies retain their own licences. See the Cargo.toml files for the
dependency set and `cargo license` for the resolved list.
