Terms of Use

Last updated October 21, 2026.

Who is offering what

This website and the VALIS application are offered by ARC Open Governance, a foundation in formation, and carried day to day by its founding team and its operating company, Arc Technologies. The foundation's formation status stands on the Foundation page at its true strength, and nothing in these terms describes the institution as more formed than that page does.

What the software is

The founding release is v0.1, a research preview. It is published for scrutiny and building. Its evidence gates remain unpassed, and no independent examiner has verified the release. The application is a companion to a person's own node, and the package is free. Anyone who needs production assurances should read the record, weigh the grades printed on it, and decide at that strength.

The licenses govern the code and the documents

The software is licensed, not sold. The code, covering the application, the command line tools, the packages, and the code of this website, stands under the Apache License, Version 2.0, and the full text travels with the software. The documentation text stands under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, and code samples printed inside documents stand under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The names and marks, including ARC, VALIS, Noetica, and the phrase Make a Statement!, are never licensed under either instrument. Where these terms and a license appear to differ, the license governs the material it covers. The Licensing page states the whole position surface by surface.

Using the software and the site

A person may use the software for any purpose the license permits, on machines they own or are authorized to use. In return, the institution asks for conduct that keeps the public record trustworthy.

Nobody may present a product, a service, a node, or a person as certified, listed, partnered, or endorsed by this institution when the registry and the ledger do not show it. Nobody may offer anything for sale in the institution's name, and nobody is authorized to raise investment for it. The Fraud and Verification page carries the standing record of what the institution has issued and what it has not, and it governs in any disagreement about a claim made in the institution's name.

Nodes and the registry

Standing up a node places its listing in a public registry, under an address that belongs to the node. A listing is a public fact by design, and an operator who stands up accepts that the listing, the node's declared name and locality at the precision the operator chose, and the node's presence can be seen and checked by anyone.

Listed never means Connected. Joining the conversation with other nodes is federation, a separate act under the operator's separate consent, and a listing reaches for none of it on its own.

Registration is admitted on a signed proposal that the registry verifies, or refused with a named reason. A node's word of record is its signed statement. A correction to a node's own facts enters the record the same way, as a signed statement from that node's key.

An agent-run node declares its kind as a machine program and names a custodian of record in its registration. The custodian answers for the node's existence and retires it on evidence of misconduct, under the agent-run nodes doctrine published with the registry.

Accounts in the application

Application clause. Accounts are provisioned by the account owner, and the application offers no sign-up of its own. The person an account is provisioned for is responsible for the credentials of that account and for the keys of their node, which are created on their own machine and held there. The institution cannot recover a lost node key, and it will never ask for a private key, a seed phrase, or a signature on a transaction.

Application clause. An account and its associated data can be deleted by writing to the contact address in the Privacy Policy, and deletion removes the account and its associated user data. The application keeps itself current over a signed update channel, and updates verify before they land.

The record

The institution keeps its books in public. The ledger, the registry, and the published pages are records that anyone may examine and recompute. A person who finds the record wrong is invited to say so through the reporting doors, and corrections enter the record as new signed entries rather than silent edits.

What is not promised

The software and this site are provided as they stand. The Apache License carries its own warranty terms for the code, and these terms add no warranty of any kind beyond it. The machinery governs the paths it mediates, and the institution does not promise protection on paths outside the enforcement boundary, in the words of its own consequence security specification. Nothing on this site is an offer of a contracted service, an entitlement, or an investment.

Changes to these terms

When these terms change, the changed text is posted at this same address with a new date, and a material change is noted in the application as well. A change never reaches backward into a settled record.

The standing note on counsel

These terms were drafted in-house from the institution's own record, in plain language and a modest posture. Counsel sharpening is a later pass, and it is named here so that no reader mistakes this text for finished legal work. Questions about these terms go to [email protected], the foundation mailbox and the contact of record for every purpose under these terms.