Runtime Licence — Ripple Effect

What you may do with the Ripple Effect engine when you build it into your own software and ship it.

Version 1.0 — governs every engine release published from Ripple Effect Engine 1.5.0 while it is current, and stays with those releases afterwards.
This version will always be at https://legal.ripplefx.app/v/runtime-1.0/, whatever replaces it here.

Ripple Effect — Runtime Licence, version 1.0 (English) This version governs every engine release published from Ripple Effect Engine 1.5.0 until a later version replaces it, and it stays with each of those releases afterwards.

This Licence governs the Ripple Effect engine as a component of somebody else’s software: the native libraries, the command-line tools and the WebAssembly components published as engine releases, which you may build into a product of your own and ship to your users. It is what lets a game, an interactive-fiction player or any other program play stories made with Ripple Effect.

It does not govern the Ripple Effect application — the authoring tool you install and run — which is under the End-User Licence Agreement. The engine shipped inside the application is the application’s, and this Licence does not apply to it. Nor does it govern the hosted service, which is under the Terms of Service.

Preamble

The Licensor is ConnectingTheDots, a trade name of William Karol Di Cioccio, sole trader, VAT no. IT02224180667, Italy (“the Licensor”, “we”).

You accept this Licence by integrating, redistributing or otherwise using an engine release. If you do not accept it, you may not do any of those things. “You” (“the Integrator”) is the person or organisation that does them; where you act for an organisation, you accept for it and confirm that you may.

1. Definitions

“the Runtime”: an engine release as the Licensor publishes it — each native library, command-line tool, WebAssembly component, interface definition (WIT) and NOTICE file in an archive published at the official channels — unmodified in function. A copy that has undergone only the transformations Article 4 permits is still the Runtime, and stays under this Licence.

“Official channels”: ripplefx.app, the release repository it serves engine downloads from, and any package published by the Licensor in a public package registry.

“Integrated Product”: software you distribute in which the Runtime is included or which loads it, and which does something substantially more than expose the Runtime — a game, a story player, an application, a plug-in for another tool.

“Bindings”: source code that lets a program written in another language call the Runtime, such as a JavaScript, C# or C++ library.

“End User”: anybody who receives your Integrated Product, directly or through somebody else.

2. Licence

The Licensor grants you a worldwide, non-exclusive, free and royalty-free licence, for as long as you comply with this Licence, to:

use the Runtime in developing, testing and running an Integrated Product;
reproduce and distribute the Runtime as part of an Integrated Product, by any means — a download, a store, an installer, a game console’s distribution channel, a package registry — and to let your End Users run it as part of that product;
distribute the Runtime as part of Bindings, including in a package published to a public package registry, so that other developers can build Integrated Products with it.

There is no fee, no revenue threshold, no seat count and no registration. The licence does not depend on telling us who you are or what you make.

Bindings are yours to license. Source code you write that calls the Runtime — Bindings included — may be published under any licence you choose, an open-source one included. The Licensor’s own Bindings are published under the MIT Licence. Whatever licence Bindings carry, the Runtime they include or download stays under this one, and they must say so.

3. What stays yours

Stories, projects, campaigns and any content you or your End Users author or play are not ours, and nothing in this Licence claims any interest in them. A compiled campaign that the Runtime plays is the work of whoever authored it.

Your Integrated Product is yours. This Licence gives the Licensor no right in it, no right to inspect it and no right to be told about it.

4. Conditions

Each of these is a condition of the licence in Article 2:

The Runtime is redistributed unmodified in function. You may not change what the Runtime does — by patching, editing or recompiling its code, or by otherwise altering its behaviour — except as the Licensor’s own releases and Bindings do. You may subject the Runtime to the technical transformations that building, packaging or distributing your Integrated Product requires, provided they leave its function unchanged, including: (a) code signing it, including re-signing it with your own identity where a platform or store requires; (b) stripping debug symbols and other sections that do not affect what it does; (c) wrapping it in the container a platform loads code from, such as a framework, bundle, archive or package; (d) converting a WebAssembly component into the modules and generated interface code a host needs to load it, and generating interface code from its interface definitions; (e) compressing, bundling, renaming or relocating its files.
The Runtime is not presented as your own. You may not distribute the Runtime, or any part or transformation of it, under a name, mark or claim of authorship other than the Licensor’s; describe it, in your product or anywhere you offer it, as software developed by you or by anybody other than the Licensor; or offer it, alone or rebranded, as an engine, runtime or library of your own. Your Integrated Product is yours; the Runtime inside it remains identified as the Licensor’s through its NOTICE.
It is redistributed as part of something. You may not distribute the Runtime on its own, or in a package whose purpose is to make it available apart from an Integrated Product or Bindings.
The NOTICE travels with it. Its text, including the copyright notices of the third-party software the Runtime contains, must appear wherever your Integrated Product lists the third-party software it uses — a licences screen, a credits page, the licence files shipped beside it. This is the only attribution required. No logo, splash screen or “powered by” line is.
Your End Users get no more than you have. The NOTICE tells your End Users that they may run the Runtime as part of your Integrated Product and nothing more, and that it comes without warranty; shipping it as the previous condition requires is enough, and a product distributed without terms of its own needs nothing further. If you distribute your Integrated Product under terms of your own, they must not grant any right in the Runtime that this Licence does not give you, nor contradict the NOTICE. Including the model clause in the Annex, or terms to the same effect, satisfies this condition. Your End Users are not otherwise bound by this Licence and need not see it.

5. Restrictions

Without the Licensor’s prior written permission you may not:

modify, translate or create derivative works of the Runtime, except by the transformations Article 4 permits;
reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits despite this term — in the European Union, Articles 5(3) and 6 of Directive 2009/24/EC;
remove, alter or obscure any notice of copyright, authorship or licence it carries;
use the Runtime, or any documentation, interface definition, test fixture or other material obtained under this Licence, to develop, train or specify software that substitutes for it — an engine, a runtime or an authoring tool that plays or writes the same campaigns in its place;
sublicense the Runtime, other than as Articles 2 and 4 allow your End Users and Bindings users to use it;
use it in breach of export-control or sanctions law.

Nothing in this Article limits what applicable law lets you do regardless of any contract — in particular, observing, studying and testing how the Runtime behaves while you use it as this Licence allows, and decompiling it to the extent indispensable for interoperability. Information obtained that way may not, as the same law provides, be used to develop a program substantially similar to the Runtime.

6. Source code

The Runtime’s source code is not published, and this Licence grants no right to it. Interface definitions, documentation and test material the Licensor publishes for building Integrated Products and Bindings may be used for that purpose — generating interface code from the interface definitions included — and Article 5’s bar on substitutes applies to them.

Bindings the Licensor publishes are under their own licence, as Article 2 says, and this Licence does not restrict them. The Runtime they carry or download stays under this one.

7. No warranty

THE RUNTIME IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. The Licensor does not warrant that the Runtime is free of errors, that it will run on any particular platform, or that a later release will remain compatible with an earlier one except as its version number promises.

These exclusions do not apply to the Licensor’s wilful misconduct or gross negligence, and do not prejudice any right that mandatory law gives you and that cannot be excluded.

You are responsible for your Integrated Product, including testing the Runtime in it and supporting your End Users.

8. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Licensor is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages arising from the Runtime or its use, including lost profits, lost revenue and loss of data.

The Licensor’s aggregate liability to you, on any basis, is limited to €500.00. The Runtime is supplied free of charge, and this figure is stated rather than tied to a price paid because there is none.

Excluded from that limitation, and governed by law: the Licensor’s wilful misconduct or gross negligence, personal injury, liability under product-liability law, and any other liability that cannot be limited by law.

If you are a consumer within the meaning of applicable law, nothing in this Licence limits or excludes the Licensor’s liability beyond what mandatory consumer-protection law permits.

9. Your claims against us, and ours against you

You will hold the Licensor harmless from claims made by your End Users or other third parties that arise from your Integrated Product — its features, its content, its distribution, or a breach of Article 4 — except to the extent that the claim arises from the Licensor’s own breach of this Licence, wilful misconduct or gross negligence.

10. Term and termination

This Licence takes effect when you first do something it covers and continues until terminated.

You may terminate it at any time by ceasing to distribute the Runtime.

The Licensor may terminate it if you breach it: for a breach capable of being cured, thirty (30) days after written notice, if it is not cured in that time; for one that is not — in particular changing what the Runtime does, presenting it as your own, or breaching Article 5’s bar on substitutes — with immediate effect.

Copies already in your End Users’ hands are unaffected. Termination stops you distributing the Runtime from that day; it does not revoke the right of an End User to go on running a copy of your Integrated Product they received before it, under the terms you gave them.

Articles 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12 and 13 survive termination.

11. Updates and changes to this Licence

A version of this Licence attaches to the engine releases published while it is current, and stays with them. A later version governs later releases only: an Integrated Product you have shipped with a given release goes on being governed by the version that came with that release, for as long as you distribute it, and nobody can change that under you. To take a later release is to accept the version that comes with it.

This Licence is versioned major.minor. A minor version changes the wording without changing the terms, and applies to the releases of its own version onwards. A major version changes the terms, and is published at least thirty (30) days before the first release it governs.

A version that is not yet in force may be corrected. Until the first engine release it governs is published and somebody first relies on it, a version binds nobody and is corrected where it stands.

Every version of this Licence that has ever been in force stays published at its own permanent address. This one is at https://legal.ripplefx.app/v/runtime-1.0/.

12. Governing law and jurisdiction

This Licence is governed by Italian law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules.

The courts of the place where the defendant is domiciled have jurisdiction, under the general rules that would apply without any agreement on the point. If you are a consumer, the mandatory protections of the law of your habitual residence, and its mandatory forum, are unaffected.

13. Final provisions

Entire agreement. This Licence is the entire agreement between you and the Licensor about the Runtime. Where you are also a user of the application or the hosted service, the End-User Licence Agreement and the Terms of Service govern those separately, and none of the three limits the others.

Severability. If any provision is held invalid, the rest stands, and the invalid provision is read as the nearest valid one to what it says.

No waiver. Not enforcing a provision on one occasion does not waive it.

Assignment. The Licensor may assign this Licence to a limited company it owns or controls, on the same terms. You may assign it together with the Integrated Product it relates to.

Language. This Licence is published in English, and the English text governs.

Questions, or to ask for permission this Licence does not give: legal@ripplefx.app.

Annex — Model clause for your End Users’ terms

Including this clause in the terms you distribute your Integrated Product under, or terms to the same effect, satisfies the last condition of Article 4.

This product includes the Ripple Effect Runtime, © ConnectingTheDots, used under licence. You may run it only as part of this product. You may not extract it to use or distribute it apart from this product, modify it, or reverse engineer it except as applicable law expressly permits. It is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, and to the extent the law allows its licensor is not liable for any damage arising from it.

ConnectingTheDots — William Karol Di Cioccio — VAT IT02224180667 — ripplefx.app