Licence

VectorStep is free to download and use, including commercially, under a proprietary end user licence agreement. There is no fee, no seat count, and no registration. The full text ships as LICENSE inside every release artifact.

It is not open source. The source repositories are private, and the software is distributed as container images and installers rather than as code.

What the licence permits

• Install and run it anywhere, on any number of machines you control, for any purpose including commercial ones.
• Your data and your output are yours. Nothing in the licence gives the author any interest in what you process or in what the pipelines produce.
• Configure it freely — pipelines, agents, executors, and models are all yours to define. Configuration is not modification.

What it does not permit

• Redistribution. You may not publish, resell, sublicense, or otherwise pass the software on to a third party.
• Modification or derivative works. Extension points that work through configuration are fine; changing the software itself is not.
• Reverse engineering, except where the law gives you a non-excludable right to it — UK users retain their rights under section 50B of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. If you need interoperability information, ask first; it may simply be available.
• Using the VectorStep name or mark in a way that implies your product is endorsed by or affiliated with this project.

Third-party components

VectorStep redistributes open source components under their own licences — FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Pydantic, the OpenTelemetry SDK, and others. Every release artifact ships a THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt reproducing those licences in full. Your rights under those licences are unaffected by the VectorStep licence.

Code contributions are not accepted

This is a single-maintainer project run alongside a full-time job, and there is no capacity to run a contribution process. Please don’t send patches, pull requests, or code in issues — anything sent as feedback may be used freely under clause 6 of the licence, which is exactly why code shouldn’t be sent that way.

Everything short of code is genuinely wanted:

• Bug reports. Steps to reproduce, what you expected, what happened, and the version you were running are usually enough.
• Feature requests and use cases — especially ones that explain what you were trying to do, not just what you want added. These shape the roadmap more than feature requests on their own.
• Questions about how something works. If the docs didn’t answer it, that’s a documentation bug and worth reporting.
• Reports that the documentation is wrong or confusing. Treated as bugs.

Security issues

Please don’t report a suspected vulnerability by email or in public — see Status & support for the private reporting route.

Getting in touch

If you’d rather just talk to a person — about a use case, whether something is a bug, or anything else — reach out at alex@vectorstep.io.