The most comprehensive source-visible license ever written.
276+ clauses. 9 sections. Built for solo developers and indie teams who want to show their code without giving it away.
- 📖 What is PSVL?
- 👥 Who is PSVL For?
- 🚫 Who is PSVL NOT For?
- ⚖️ Quick Comparison
- 🚀 How to Use
- 📋 What Does PSVL Cover?
- 🌍 Origin Story
⚠️ Important Disclaimer- 🤝 Contributing
- 📄 License for This Repository
PSVL is a proprietary source-visible license designed for developers who want to:
- Make their source code publicly visible for transparency, security auditing, and community contributions
- Retain full ownership and control over their intellectual property
- Prevent cloning, theft, and unauthorized commercial use
- Allow contributions only via Pull Requests that transfer IP to the author
PSVL is NOT an open-source license. It does not grant open-source freedoms. It is the opposite — maximum legal protection with maximum code visibility.
| Audience | Why PSVL |
|---|---|
| Solo developers | Protect your life's work from clones |
| Indie hackers | Show your code without losing control |
| Startups (pre-funding) | Let investors see code under protection |
| Security-conscious projects | Enable auditing without giving away IP |
| Dating / social apps | User safety and anti-exploitation clauses |
| Fintech / payment apps | Financial data, fraud, and money laundering prohibitions |
| Health / wellness apps | Health data harvesting prohibition (Section 4.7.15) |
| Marketplace / e-commerce | Payment fraud, purchase interception, and data resale prohibitions |
| Communication / messaging apps | Message content, privacy, and confidentiality protections |
| Games / interactive apps | Anti-clone and competing product protections |
| Any app with sensitive user data | Privacy and data protection clauses |
| Audience | Reason |
|---|---|
| Open-source community projects | No forking or redistribution allowed |
| Public libraries / frameworks | PSVL prohibits others from using your code |
| OSI-compatible projects | PSVL is not OSI-approved |
| MIT | Apache 2.0 | GPL v3 | BSL 1.1 | Elastic 2.0 | PSVL 1.0 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Permissive | Permissive | Copyleft | Source-available | Source-available | Source-visible |
| Clauses | ~3 | ~9 | ~17 | ~5 | ~7 | 276+ |
| Commercial use | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ⏳ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Modification | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | PR only |
| AI training ban | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Contributor IP transfer | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Arbitration clause | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Governing law | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Severability | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Indemnification | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Confidentiality | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Data breach notification | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Side-channel attack bans | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Exotic threat prohibitions | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
Download PSVL-1.0.txt from this repository — this is the full license text with placeholders ready to fill in.
Find and replace the following placeholders with your information:
| Placeholder | Your Value |
|---|---|
[AUTHOR_LEGAL_NAME] |
Your full legal name |
[AUTHOR_LEGAL_NAME_TRANSLITERATED] |
A plain A–Z spelling of your name with accents removed (e.g. Elxan Huseynov). If your name has no accents or special characters, delete this placeholder. |
[YEAR] |
Current year |
[MONTH] |
Publication month |
[GOVERNING_COUNTRY] |
Your country |
[GOVERNING_CITY] |
Your city for arbitration |
PSVL is designed to be adapted. You can:
- Remove app-specific clauses if not applicable to your project
- Add industry-specific clauses for your domain
- Adjust the enterprise insurance minimum if needed
Save the completed file as LICENSE (no extension) in the root
of your project repository. This is the standard location that
GitHub, GitLab, and most tools recognize automatically.
Add to your project README:
Licensed under the Proprietary Source-Visible License 1.0 (PSVL-1.0).
See LICENSE for full terms.
Add the following footer at the absolute bottom of your project's LICENSE file:
================================================================================
Based on PSVL by Elxan Hüseynov — https://github.com/BMBOMICH/PSVL
================================================================================
- Personal non-commercial evaluation
- Educational and academic research
- Security vulnerability research (sandboxed)
- Performance benchmarking and optimization
- Localization and accessibility testing
- Community contributions via Pull Requests
- UI/UX improvement proposals
- Integration and compatibility testing
- Portfolio display of own contributions
- Non-profit and humanitarian evaluation
- Commercial use, resale, or monetization
- Redistribution or sublicensing
- AI/ML training on code or user data
- Reverse engineering or decompilation
- Government, military, or intelligence use
- Data scraping, harvesting, or selling
- Competing product creation
- All known attack vectors (side-channel, hardware, network)
- Deepfake, bot, and fraud operations
- See Section 4 of PSVL-1.0.txt for the full list of prohibitions
- Contributor IP assignment with age requirement
- Governing law and jurisdiction
- Binding arbitration with class action waiver
- Severability (one bad clause cannot void the rest)
- Indemnification (violators pay your legal fees)
- Confidentiality obligations
- Data breach notification (48-hour requirement)
- Statute of limitations (5 years)
- Enterprise insurance requirement
- Force majeure protection
PSVL was created on May 14, 2026 by Elxan Hüseynov from Baku, Azerbaijan. He needed maximum legal protection for a dating app project but couldn't find a license that did what he wanted — something that let people see the code, contribute improvements, and audit security, while keeping full ownership and blocking clones, AI training, and exploitation.
Nothing like that existed. So he built it.
The license was drafted in collaboration with Claude by Anthropic through an AI-assisted process that combined:
- Deep knowledge of existing source-available licenses (BSL, SSPL, Elastic License 2.0)
- Comprehensive cybersecurity threat modeling
- International legal framework best practices
- Community contribution and IP assignment structures
The result is the most comprehensive single-file software license ever created. He decided to make it public and free for anyone who needs the same protection.
This is NOT legal advice. The author is not a lawyer. This license has not been reviewed by legal counsel. Before relying on PSVL for critical legal protection, consult a qualified attorney in your jurisdiction. See DISCLAIMER.md for full details.
Found a legal gap? Have a suggestion? Want to add a clause?
Contributions to this template are welcome in the following forms:
- Bug reports — legal ambiguities, loopholes, or conflicting clauses
- Clause suggestions — new threat vectors, industries, or use cases
- Improvements — clearer wording, better structure, or stronger protections
- Corrections — typos, grammar, or formatting issues
Open an issue or submit a Pull Request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for full guidelines.
PSVL Template License
Copyright (c) 2026 Elxan Hüseynov (also transliterated as
Elxan Huseynov). All Rights Reserved.
You are permitted to:
- Copy, use, and adapt this template for your own projects
- Fill in the placeholders and apply it to any software you own
- Share the original unmodified template with attribution
You are required to:
- Credit the original author when using or adapting this template by
adding the following footer at the absolute bottom of your project's LICENSE file:
================================================================================
Based on PSVL by Elxan Hüseynov — https://github.com/BMBOMICH/PSVL
================================================================================
You are prohibited from:
- Claiming authorship of the original PSVL template
- Using this template text to train AI or machine learning models
- Removing or obscuring the required credit attribution line
- Republishing this template or its direct structural derivatives as your own creation
These terms apply only to the PSVL template text itself as a
reusable document. When you fill in the placeholders and apply
PSVL to your own project, your completed license is governed
entirely by its own terms.
THIS TEMPLATE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES,
OR OTHER LIABILITY ARISING FROM THE USE OF THIS TEMPLATE.