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Why the AI Dev Kit and Capture Service are non-commercial source-available while the plugin stays GPL

· 3 min read
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Senior Web Developer

The question: Is there a way to secure the AI Dev Kit code from developers who want to reverse-engineer it — base64, a password an agent has to supply before reading, something like that? And if not, how do you license the intent?

Context​

The kit is a public repository of Markdown playbooks, skills and Node scripts, plus the Capture Service that turns a live site into the converter's input. Its value is the accumulated conversion know-how from many real-site training sessions, not any one algorithm. The consumer of that know-how is an AI agent reading plain text. The WordPress side — the plugin, its extensions and the theme — runs inside WordPress and is GPL like WordPress itself.

Options considered​

  • Obfuscate or encode the sources (base64, minify, a decode step). Trivially reversed, and it breaks the whole point of the kit: an agent has to read the playbooks to follow them. Anything the agent can decode, a person can decode.
  • A password or "unlock" gate an agent must pass before reading. Same problem in a different coat. The gate is in the same repository as the content, so it is documentation of how to open itself. It also punishes legitimate users on every clone.
  • Keep it private / sell access. Kills the reach that makes the converter useful, and contradicts the plugin being open source.
  • License the intent. Leave the code readable, state clearly what is and is not allowed, and rely on the license for the commercial case. This is what every source-available project does; it does not stop a determined copier, but it makes commercial reuse a legal problem for them rather than a technical one for us.

Decision​

A license split by what each part is:

  • UnysonPlus plugin, extensions (Site Converter included) and theme: GPL-2.0-or-later, unchanged.
  • Kit documentation, skills, playbooks: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — the standard license for prose that may be shared and adapted non-commercially.
  • Kit code and the Capture Service: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — a modern, readable non-commercial software license with a clear personal / non-profit / research carve-out.
  • The conversion corpus (captured sites) is never published.
  • A plain-words LICENSE in each repository lists what you may and may not do, and one sentence is non-negotiable: using a site you built with the kit commercially is fine. The restriction is on the kit and the service, not their output.
  • Every source file carries an SPDX-License-Identifier line; AGENTS.md tells agents to carry the notices forward.
  • Versions of the kit already published under GPL stay GPL; the new terms apply from the first release that ships these files.

Why​

Obfuscation is theatre when the reader is an agent that needs the plain text, and any gate against copying is a gate against the people the kit exists for. A license does the one thing code cannot: it separates "may read and use" from "may resell". Choosing two well-known licenses rather than a custom text keeps the terms recognisable to anyone deciding whether they can use the kit, and PolyForm's explicit non-commercial definition avoids the ambiguity of CC-NC for software. Keeping WordPress-side code GPL preserves the open-source promise where it matters most and where the GPL is required anyway.