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summary A licence notice inside every shipped tool, stamped by the release step from the package's access - MIT in full for free tools, the Patreon licence for anything not free, plus the third-party notices SearchPalette (MIT) and the operator family (TDFam, Apache 2.0) owe. Free tools stay MIT; the terms gained No derived tools and Projects you deliver. Built and verified 2026-10-09; reaches each tool at its next release.
verified 2026-10-09
since 2026-10-09
skill fns-packaging

Licence notices inside the tools

The licence lives on the website (/terms/, /patreon/) and in the repo (LICENSE, THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md). A .tox someone downloads, installs or gets handed carries none of it. This puts a short notice inside every shipped tool, so the file says what it is licensed under wherever it ends up.

Decided: free tools stay MIT

Owner and Claude, 2026-10-09. The aim was to stop people reselling the tools or building paid tools out of them. MIT allows both, so the question was whether to move free tools off MIT. They stay:

  • MIT is what the TouchDesigner community expects; a studio adopts an MIT tool without a legal review.
  • Every free version already released stays MIT forever, so a reseller would take the last MIT version and a new licence would protect little.
  • /terms/ promises "That will not change for a package that is already free", and /patreon/ "Nothing that is free today becomes paid later". Breaking that costs more trust than it buys.
  • Reselling something that is free on functionstore.tools mostly fails on its own; what has value (updates, integration, the Patreon tools) cannot be resold.
  • MIT does require the copyright and licence notice to stay in every copy. With the notice inside the file, a copy that strips it breaks the licence, which is something a marketplace takedown can stand on.

The promise covers packages already free. A tool that is new and free later may launch under another licence without breaking it; that is decided per tool when it comes up.

The protection goes where the paid value is: the Patreon tools, whose terms get one explicit clause (below) and whose files get the notice.

Gaps this closes

  • Gated tools say nothing in the file. A copy passed on carries no sign that it is licensed per person.
  • SearchPalette (FNS_SearchPalette) is based on Yea Chen's TD-SearchPalette, MIT. MIT requires their copyright and permission notice in every copy; today it is only in the repo's THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md, not in the artifact.
  • The operator family (FNS_OpFamily) is built with TDFam, Apache 2.0, which requires recipients to get a copy of the licence. Same gap.

How it is built

The release step stamps the notice onto the artifact copy, never the live master, the same way pre_release_common.py already rewrites FNS_About.Owner and the _dev paths on the copy. The repo's masters stay unchanged, so no PI churn.

  • Which text comes from the package's access in the catalog: free gets the MIT notice; anything else gets the Patreon notice. In the v3.2.67 manifest that is a Patreon tier id (24 packages) or preview (14, not yet public), plus every .pro variant build. The rule is "not free", so a new gate value can never fall through to MIT. A variant is judged by the artifact being built: ColorGen is MIT, ColorGen.pro is not.
  • Foreign packages (TDXMap and any with a catalog source block) are not ours to licence and get nothing.
  • Third-party notices come from the catalog, beside the existing credit fields (author, homepage): a third_party list of {name, url, license, files}, each file a licence text under packaging/licenses/ (kept word for word in step with THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md; the test checks it). Each file becomes one more annotation. Long texts (Apache 2.0, 10,300 characters) are annotations too, not text DATs: annotations are utility ops, so a tool's own findChildren walks never see them, where a stray DAT inside FNS_OpFamily could be picked up by the tool scanning its children.
  • The toolkit bootstrap (FNSTools.tox, built by build_installer.py, which skips the package scrub) gets the MIT notice in its own step.
  • Placement: Annotate COMPs stacked above everything in the tool's network, left-aligned with it, named fns_license*. Re-stamping replaces them. Network only: annotations do not draw in a panel.
  • A failed stamp fails the export. Stamp reads every note back and raises when TD did not keep the text, and a broken third_party entry raises in Notices, so no artifact ships unlicensed or half-licensed.
  • The year is derived at release: 2023-<release year>.

Where it lives

Piece File
The texts, the access rule, the stamp packaging/license_notices.py
Third-party licence texts packaging/licenses/
What each package owes packaging/catalog.json, third_party
Package artifacts (base and variant builds) build_manifest.ScrubArtifact, called by ExportPackage
The bootstrap FNSTools.tox build_installer.BuildBootstrap
Catalog validation build_manifest.CatalogProblems
Test tests/test_license_notices.py

The texts are in license_notices.py, not here, so they cannot drift.

  • Free: title FNSTools - MIT licence; the body is the repo's LICENSE word for word with its copyright line derived for the release year and the site under it. The full text, because MIT's one condition is that it travels with every copy.
  • Patreon: title FNSTools - Patreon licence, not MIT; copyright, licensed to the person whose membership or key unlocked it, client deliveries allowed, no redistribution and no derived tool, component, plugin, library, template or project pack, and a link to /terms/.
  • Third party: titled Third party: <name> (<licence>), the project name and URL, then the licence file in full.

The terms (landed 2026-10-09)

/terms/, The Patreon packages, has two new items after "What you do not get", which no longer says "bundle the package into something you hand on": that phrase also forbade handing a client the project they paid for.

  • No derived tools. A Patreon package's networks, code or shaders, as they are or reworked, may not go into a tool, component, plugin, library, template or project pack that is distributed, sold or published. What people make with it is theirs.
  • Projects you deliver (owner, 2026-10-09: allowed). Handing a client or venue a project that uses a Patreon package, so they can run that project, is fine; they may not take the package out and use it elsewhere.

/patreon/, "Can I still read the source of a Patreon tool?", says the same in one sentence. Both pages changed in one commit, as their source comments require. Per /terms/, changes apply going forward, never to a licence already held.

Verified (2026-10-09, TD 2025.33070)

On a scratch copy of the released FNS_SearchPalette.tox, through the same /sys/quiet holder the release scrub uses:

  • comp.create(annotateCOMP) then rename, utility = True, Mode = 'annotate': both notes came back after save and reload, with title and body exactly as derived, line breaks included. A 10,300-character body (the Apache licence) survives intact.
  • The tool's own child count was unchanged (16 before and after): the notes are utility ops, invisible to default findChildren and .children.
  • No errors on the reloaded copy; notes sit above the network's top edge.
  • Re-stamping with a different access replaced the earlier notes instead of stacking them, and the gated title replaced the MIT one.

Not yet seen: how the notes read in a network editor at real zoom. The size is derived from line count at Envoy's 22 units per line.

LICENSE DATs say the same (2026-10-12)

FNS_About carries a LICENSE text DAT with the MIT text, copyright 2025, and its Deploy copies it into the package, so 151 such DATs sat in the toolkit, gated packages included: a Patreon tool shipped with the Patreon notice on top and MIT inside it (owner, 2026-10-12). Stamp now also rewrites every LICENSE DAT that holds the MIT template (it carries "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge") with the package's own licence: the release-year MIT text for a free tool, the Patreon licence under its title for anything else. A LICENSE DAT with other text is left alone: the scene changers' own Patreon licence, TDFam's Apache attribution (its full text is the separate LICENSE_Apache). Read back like the notes; a DAT that did not take the text raises. The masters keep the MIT template; the artifact is what changes.

Verified on real exports through the portable export: LayerSep3D (Base) came out with its FNS_About LICENSE reading the Patreon licence; FNS_SimpleSceneChanger kept its own LICENSE and only FNS_About's changed.

Rollout

The stamp runs on every export, and ReleaseMany exports only the packages a release bumps, so each tool gets its notice at its next release. Getting every artifact covered at once means re-exporting every package in one release; that is a release decision, not part of this change. The bootstrap gets it at the next rails rebuild, which bumps INSTALLER_VERSION like any rails change.