Why Source-Available, Not Open-Source?
PowerAim — and the upstream Aimmy it forks from — is licensed under PolyForm Noncommercial. Simply put, we do not want PowerAim published in a commercial setting.
We greatly encourage users to modify PowerAim however they see fit. However, we do not want a third party to profit off the software, and this is a value that the open-source community as a whole does not share.
The project was developed in a community where subsets are admittedly profit-motivated. Example: a recently released similar tool requires users to go through not one, not two, but five ad-only webpages before they can use the program.
This is not an environment we want to promote. But we are also aware that making the source available to the public makes it an attractive base for software developers building a competing product. Going fully closed-source isn’t an option we want either, because it cuts off the legitimate community of accessibility users, hobbyist contributors, model trainers, and translators who keep the project alive.
So we settled on source-available.
What you can do
- Read the source
- Run PowerAim on your own machine
- Modify it for personal use
- Fork it on GitHub
- Contribute PRs back upstream
- Train and submit models
- Translate the UI to new languages
- Share your modifications with friends, on Discord, on YouTube — anywhere non-commercial
What you cannot do
- Sell PowerAim or any derivative
- Bundle it into a paid product
- Put it behind paywalls, ads, or “verify you’re human” gates
- Use it as the base for a commercial competing product
The legal definition
Per LawInsider, “Non-Commercial Use” means:
any use or activity where a fee is not charged and the purpose is not the sale of a good or service, and the use or activity is not intended to produce a profit.
If you’re using PowerAim privately, sharing it with friends, or improving it for the community — you’re fine. If you’re charging money, running ads, or building a business on top of it — you’re not.
License text
The full license lives at:
https://github.com/MarsQQ/Aimmy/blob/master/LICENSE
The PolyForm Noncommercial license is short and human-readable. Five minutes is enough to read the whole thing.
Why this isn’t BSD / MIT
We could have used BSD or MIT and gotten more users. But the cost — watching the project be repackaged with an ad wall and sold — wasn’t worth it. We’d rather have a smaller, healthier community than a bigger, exploited one.
Thank you for respecting that.
The original upstream rationale is preserved in SourceAvailable.md at the repo root.