¶Licence

eterm is free to download and free to use. Every feature in it works without a licence, and always will.

What a licence changes is one thing: now and then — not in the first twenty minutes of a session, and not more than once every three days — a strip appears under the session to say that eterm is free, that a licence exists, and where. A licence turns that strip off. It is a thank-you for the work, and nothing is held back from anyone who does not buy one.

¶Getting one

elyracode.com/eterm. What comes back is a line of text beginning ETERM-.

¶Entering it

cmd-, → Licence → Set key…, paste, return. The status row then says who it is licensed to, and the strip does not come back. The licence goes into the login keychain, beside the other secrets eterm keeps, and never into settings.toml.

A licence that is not accepted says why: not a licence when it is not the shape of one, the signature does not match when a character went missing in the paste, expired when it has a date and the date has passed. Perpetual licences have no date.

¶How it is checked

On this machine, and nowhere else. A licence is signed with a key only the shop has; eterm carries the matching public half, which can verify a signature and cannot make one. Nothing is looked up, nothing phones home, and a licence bought once works on a machine that has never been online. There is no account, no seat count, and no activation server to go away.