Status: draft. Not legal advice. This was written against what the project
actually is and ships. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and the
placeholders marked […] must be filled in before publishing. It is the
counterpart to TERMS.md, which covers using the software; this covers the
software and its source. PRIVACY.md is the third of the set.
Last updated: 2026-09-06 · Applies to: Nightjar Browser 0.3.3
Copyright © 2026 Purple Comet LLC. All rights reserved.
Nightjar Browser is proprietary software. It is not open source, and no open-source licence applies to it.
This is a deliberate choice rather than an omission. An open-source licence grants the right to copy, modify and redistribute; that is the opposite of what this project wants, and adding one to gain the appearance of openness would give away the only thing a licence protects.
Install and use the software, on devices you control, under the terms in
TERMS.md §2. That is the licence granted to users, and nothing here narrows
it.
The source is published so that the claims in PRIVACY.md can be checked
rather than believed. A browser whose case is that nothing leaves your machine
is a browser that should be readable, and "trust us" is a weak answer where
"look for yourself" is available.
So, explicitly: you may read, review, audit, quote in a review or a security report, and build this source for your own use on devices you control. No permission is needed for any of that, and nothing in section 3 is intended to discourage it. Reporting what you find is welcome, including publicly, and including when it is unflattering.
What this is not is an open-source licence. Those grant the right to copy, modify and redistribute, and that is a different thing from the right to look. Calling this open source would be inaccurate; source-available is the accurate term.
One limit is worth stating so nobody relies on more than is true: reading the source shows what the source does, not that a downloaded binary was built from it. Builds are not yet reproducible, so anyone who needs that assurance should build from source themselves.
Without written permission:
The application is Python, packaged with PyInstaller. Its modules are shipped as bytecode, and bytecode can be read: function names, docstrings and control flow are all recoverable from any downloaded copy with ordinary tools.
Saying so plainly is better than a clause implying otherwise. The protection here is copyright, not concealment: reading the code is possible, and copying it into another product is what this licence forbids. Where local law grants a right to decompile for interoperability, that right stands and this section does not attempt to remove it.
The software bundles and depends on third-party components under their own licences, which govern those components and are unaffected by this one. They include, among others:
ggml libraries — MITTheir notices ship with the build and must not be removed.
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md lists every one with its version and licence, and is
generated by tools/generate_notices.py from what is actually installed rather
than maintained by hand — a hand-written list is accurate the day it is written
and wrong from the next dependency bump onward.
Provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. See TERMS.md §8 for the
limitation of liability, which depends on the entity and jurisdiction that are
still to be settled.
trynightjar@outlook.com Purple Comet LLC, California, United States