Vigil™ runs on Apache-2.0 — a standard, permissive open source license. Anyone can take the code, fork it, deploy it, even build a commercial product on top of it. We mean that. It’s why a government or an aid organization can stand up their own instance without waiting on a lawyer to bless a license nobody’s ever heard of.
What isn’t up for grabs is the name. “Vigil” and “YouTheWave”™ — the names, the logos, the brand — are trademarks, protected separately from the code. A fork has to rebrand. Nobody gets to build something under our name that isn’t actually us.
We tried the other way first: a custom license that tried to keep commercial use out entirely. It sounded protective. It wasn’t. It made the code harder for the exact institutions we built it for to adopt, and it didn’t actually stop anyone determined to misuse it — a license restriction doesn’t reach someone who ignores licenses. So we fixed it. Code open, name locked. That’s the real fortress.
This is the same posture behind everything we build: free to the people who need it, always — no family in crisis ever pays for Vigil, and nothing in our roadmap changes that. Where a tool of ours ever needs to cover its own costs, it’ll look like a Khan Academy — an optional way to give back, never a wall in front of someone who can’t.
Not governments. Not institutions. One person is a ripple — together, we are a rising tide.
— Orlando Toro, Founder