The rules, plainly.

By installing and using any Kernora software — including the Nora Engine, Factlets (agent adapters such as claude-factlet, kiro-factlet, vscode-factlet, and others), Factbooks, the Factlet protocol reference implementation, and associated tools — you agree to these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, do not install or use the software.

1. License and Software Governance

The Nora Engine, all Factlets, and Kernora-published Factbooks are licensed under the Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2), which governs your rights and responsibilities.

Key ELv2 Obligations

• You may use Nora, its Factlets, and Factbooks for internal purposes — running inside your company, on your machines, and with your data.
• You may NOT reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Nora Engine or any Factlet in order to create a competing product or hosted service.
• You may NOT offer Nora, its Factlets, the Factlet protocol implementation, or derivative works as a hosted service to third parties without explicit written permission.
• You may NOT remove or alter copyright, license, or attribution notices.
• You may NOT use the Nora Engine, Factlets, or their source code to build a substantially similar product that captures, analyzes, or scores AI session data, extracts decision traces, or synthesizes Factbooks.

The Factlet protocol specification is published openly for interoperability. Building a Factlet that connects your tool to the Nora Engine, or authoring and publishing Factbooks against the open spec, is permitted and encouraged. Building a competing engine that replaces Nora is not.

For exceptions or commercial licensing, contact us via GitHub or .

2. Disclaimer of Warranties

Nora is provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Kernora disclaims all warranties, express and implied, including but not limited to:

• Merchantability
• Fitness for a particular purpose
• Non-infringement
• Accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of outputs from the DREAM consolidation loop, Factbooks, patterns, decisions, or any AI-generated suggestions

Nora processes AI-generated content. While we strive for accuracy, we make no guarantee that extracted patterns, decisions, analyses, or Factbook contents are correct. You are responsible for verifying any information Nora generates before acting on it.

3. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Kernora and its developers are NOT liable for:

• Data loss or corruption
• Business interruption
• Lost profits or revenue
• Indirect, incidental, or consequential damages
• Damages arising from your use or inability to use Nora
• Costs incurred on your LLM provider account (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, AWS Bedrock, Ollama, or any other provider) from your own API keys

This limitation applies even if Kernora has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

4. Your Responsibilities

API Keys and Credentials (BYOK)

Nora is bring-your-own-key. You are responsible for:

• Obtaining and maintaining your own LLM API keys (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Bedrock, Llama, Mistral, Ollama, or any other provider)
• Keeping your API keys secure, confidential, and stored only in your local config.toml
• Managing and paying for all API usage costs incurred through your keys — including costs from the DREAM consolidation loop and any third-party model output processing
• Complying with your LLM provider's terms of service

Kernora does not provide, manage, broker, or support your API keys. Your relationship with LLM providers is direct.

Team Mode and S3 Storage

If you turn on Team mode to sync Factbooks and session signals to Amazon S3:

• You are responsible for creating, securing, and managing your S3 bucket
• You control bucket encryption, access policies, IAM, and data retention
• Kernora does not access, store, or manage your S3 bucket or any data in it
• You are responsible for S3 costs and security

Data Backups

In solo mode, Kernora stores nothing on remote servers. Your echo.db file — including sessions, patterns, Factbooks, and DREAM outputs — is stored only on your machine. You are responsible for backing up your local data. Nora makes no guarantees about data persistence on your device.

5. Acceptable Use Policy

You agree NOT to:

• Use the Nora Engine, Factlets, Factbooks, or their source code to build a competing product that captures, analyzes, scores, or organizes AI session data — or that synthesizes Factbooks from session telemetry
• Offer Nora, any Factlet, or Kernora-published Factbooks as a hosted service or SaaS without written authorization
• Use Nora in violation of any applicable law or regulation
• Use Nora to process illegal or harmful content
• Attempt to circumvent, disable, or interfere with Nora's licensing or security mechanisms
• Sublicense or redistribute Nora or any Factlet without authorization
• Scrape, crawl, or programmatically extract code, documentation, or architecture details from Kernora repositories for the purpose of building a competing product
• Use AI tools (including LLMs, code-generation tools, or automated analysis) to reverse-engineer the Nora Engine's analysis algorithms, scoring logic, DREAM consolidation, or Agent Bus internals for the purpose of replication

6. Third-Party Services and Dependencies

LLM Providers

Nora uses third-party LLM services (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Bedrock, Llama, Mistral, Ollama, and others). Your use of these services is governed by their respective terms of service and privacy policies:

• Anthropic Terms
• OpenAI Terms
• Google AI Terms
• xAI Terms
• AWS Bedrock Terms

Kernora is not responsible for LLM provider outages, changes to their APIs, pricing changes, or their compliance with their own terms.

AWS S3 (Team Mode)

Team mode uses Amazon S3. Your use of S3 is governed by AWS Service Terms and the AWS Privacy Policy.

7. No Support or Maintenance Guarantee

Kernora provides Nora under an open license. While we welcome contributions, feedback, and issue reports, we do not guarantee:

• Bug fixes or patches
• Feature updates or enhancements
• Technical support or customer service
• Security updates
• Backwards compatibility across major versions

Community support is available via GitHub Issues. Paid support and formal SLAs are available under commercial agreements.

8. Termination

You may stop using Nora at any time by uninstalling it and deleting your local data (echo.db and config.toml). In solo mode there is no account to delete and no data for Kernora to purge — your data exists only on your device. In Team mode, you are responsible for deleting any data in your own S3 bucket.

9. Governing Law and Jurisdiction

These Terms of Service are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law principles. Any dispute shall be resolved exclusively in the state and federal courts located in Delaware.

10. Modifications to Terms

Kernora may update these Terms of Service at any time. Changes become effective when posted to this page. Continued use of Nora after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated terms. Material changes will be called out in the project changelog.

11. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions shall remain in full force and effect.

12. Entire Agreement

These Terms of Service, together with the Privacy Policy and the Elastic License 2.0, constitute the entire agreement between you and Kernora regarding Nora and supersede all prior negotiations, representations, and agreements — written or oral.