Terms of use

[terms]
publisher = "VAIR LTD, no. 16938467"
binds     = ["vairworks.co.uk", "released tooling"]
excludes  = "consulting, which has its own contract"
contact   = "hello@vairworks.co.uk"

VAIR LTD publishes this site. The company is on the register for England and Wales under number 16938467, and the office recorded against that number is where formal service of any document belongs. Everything else reaches the company at hello@vairworks.co.uk.

Two things fall inside this document: the pages published at vairworks.co.uk, and command line or service tooling distributed under the VAIR name. The tooling parts travel with the release they govern, rather than being bolted on after people are already running it.

One thing falls outside it. A consulting engagement runs on a signed contract negotiated for that engagement, and part 15 explains how the two documents sit together.

[acceptance]
trigger  = "reading, installing, or running"
on_behalf_of_org = "authority assumed from the acceptor"

Reading a page here, fetching a release, or running one of the tools puts you inside this document. There is no checkbox and no click-through wrapper, because a wrapper nobody reads adds ceremony rather than agreement. If some part of what follows does not suit you, the remedy is to leave the material alone.

Where you accept on behalf of an employer or a client, you are taken to have the authority to do that, and from that point "you" in this document means that organisation rather than you personally. Where you deal outside the course of a business, the protections statute gives an individual in that position stay untouched by anything written here, and where a line below would cut across one of them, the statute wins and that line falls away to the extent it has to.

[revision]
current = "A"
dated   = "2026-08-07"
rule    = "letter moves with the position"

These conditions will move as the tooling does. When they move, the letter and the date at the head of the document move with them, and what stood before is not quietly overwritten in place. The front page treats its own revisions the same way, for the same reason: a document that changes silently cannot be argued with.

Where a revision would meaningfully cut down what somebody already relies on, it is announced before it takes hold rather than after, and anybody already on a paid arrangement gets a clear month to walk away instead.

[site_use]
read     = "freely, no account, no fee"
quote    = "with attribution and a link"
republish_wholesale = false

The pages here are published to be read, quoted and disagreed with. Quoting a passage in a post, a talk, a review or an internal document is welcome, provided the company is named and, where the medium allows one, a link points back to the page the passage came from.

What is not on offer is wholesale reproduction: lifting a page or a document entire and re-hosting it elsewhere, with or without attribution, or harvesting the text in bulk to resell, redistribute, or train a model on. Ordinary indexing by a search engine is expected and is not caught by that.

[licence]
grant       = "personal, limited, revocable, not transferable"
machines    = "those under your own control"
ownership   = "stays where it started"
open_source = "component licence prevails over this part"

Where you hold a release and any fee attaching to it has been paid, you get permission to run the tooling for the purpose it was built for, on machines under your own control, for as long as the arrangement lasts. The permission is personal to you, cannot be handed on, and can be withdrawn under part 14.

Permission to run something is not ownership of it, and nothing here shifts ownership. Within the grant you may not rent it out, lend it, resell it, sublicense it, strip or alter the notices carried inside it, or take it apart in order to assemble a competitor from the pieces. Copying beyond what ordinary use requires sits outside the grant as well.

Taking a build apart to see how it works is restricted, but only as far as the law allows a restriction. The rights the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 reserves for decompilation and for making one program work with another survive this document intact, and nothing above is an attempt to sign them away.

Parts of a release arrive under somebody else's open source licence. Those parts answer to that licence, not to this part, and where the two disagree the component's own terms take precedence. The applicable texts travel with the release rather than being referred to vaguely.

[prohibited]
class = ["unlawful", "intrusive", "disruptive",
         "circumventing", "impersonating"]

The list below is short because most of it follows from ordinary law. It is written out anyway so that nobody has to guess where the edge is.

• Do not put the site or the tooling to any purpose the law forbids, and do not use either as an instrument of fraud.
• Do not reach for access to a system, an account, a network or a store of data that has not been granted to you, and do not probe or map this company's infrastructure without a written invitation to do so.
• Do not degrade what is running here, whether by flooding it, by automating requests far past any sane rate, or by deliberately exhausting a resource.
• Do not introduce hostile code, and do not use anything released here as a carrier for it.
• Do not work around a licence check, an authentication step, a quota or a rate limit.
• Do not tread on anybody else's copyright, trade mark, confidence or privacy while using this material.
• Do not harvest these pages in bulk for republication or model training, as part 4 already sets out.
• Do not pretend to be somebody you are not, and do not overstate your connection to any organisation, this one included.

[research]
welcome  = true
route    = "hello@vairworks.co.uk, subject: Security report"
pursue_good_faith_reporter = false

Part 6 forbids probing without an invitation. This part is the invitation, and it is a standing one. If you find a defect in something published here, write to hello@vairworks.co.uk with Security report in the subject line, describe what you found, and leave a reasonable interval for a repair before you write it up publicly.

A researcher working in good faith within those bounds has nothing to fear from this company: no legal action, no complaint to an employer, no attempt to have a talk pulled. The bounds are the ordinary ones. Do not go looking through anybody's personal data, do not destroy or alter what you find, do not degrade the service for other people, and stop at the point where you have demonstrated the problem rather than pressing on to see how far it goes.

[datasheet]
document = "technical description, revision A"
binding  = false
changes  = "carried by the revision letter"

The front page sets out work areas, a configuration format, a reference architecture and the reasoning under each. It is a technical description, written to be read closely and argued with. What it is not is a contractual undertaking that a given capability will behave a given way against your estate, on your runners, under your workload.

Nothing on that page, and nothing in a specimen configuration printed on it, forms part of a contract. Where a capability matters enough to build on, put it in an engagement contract under part 15, where it can carry a date and a consequence. A technical description tells you how something works; a contract is what makes it owed to you.

Formats move. Where a change to the configuration format would break a file you already maintain, it arrives with a note in this document and a new revision letter rather than as a silent edit to the old one.

[ownership]
text_and_diagrams = "VAIR LTD, or licensed to it"
marks             = ["VAIR", "vairworks"]
other_marks       = "named descriptively only"

The wording on these pages, the schematic, the typographic arrangement and the code specimens belong to this company or are used here under licence. The name VAIR and the compound vairworks are used as marks of the company, together with the paired bell device drawn at the head of every page.

Where another organisation's name or mark appears anywhere on this site, it appears to point at that organisation and nothing more. It stays theirs, its use here implies no endorsement in either direction, and no connection should be read into it.

[inbound]
your_material = "stays yours"
suggestions   = "usable without payment or credit"
confidential_by_default = false

Configuration extracts, logs and other material you send in stay yours. This company claims nothing in them and uses them only to answer whatever you sent them about. Where material arrives inside an engagement, the privacy manifest sets out the processor position, and the engagement contract sets out the confidentiality position.

Suggestions are treated differently, and it is fairer to say so plainly than to leave it ambiguous. If you propose an improvement to the configuration format, the scheduling model or anything else in the design, that idea can be used freely, without payment, without attribution and without any duty to keep it to ourselves. Send an idea you need to keep controlled under a confidentiality agreement instead, agreed before it arrives, not attached to it afterwards.

Ordinary correspondence is treated with discretion as a matter of practice. Marking a message confidential is not, on its own, enough to create an obligation that was never agreed.

[availability]
target      = "reachable, no figure attached"
guarantee   = none
maintenance = "announced ahead where timing allows"

This site is a set of static files behind a content network, which is about as durable an arrangement as a small company can run, but durability is not a guarantee and none is given here. Pages may be unreachable while a provider has trouble, while a certificate rotates, or while something is being rebuilt.

Where something under the VAIR name runs as a service, an interruption we schedule gets announced ahead of time where the timing allows it. Where a specific level of service is needed, that belongs in an engagement contract with a figure and a remedy attached, not in a document published for everybody at once.

[warranty]
site_and_tooling = "as it stands, as it is available"
implied_terms    = "excluded so far as the law allows"
statutory_rights = "untouched"

What is published here is offered as it stands and as it happens to be available. So far as the law permits a term to be excluded, terms that would otherwise be read into this arrangement by implication are excluded, including any implied assurance about merchantable standard, suitability for something you have in mind, or freedom from interruption and defect.

Two things are worth saying in plainer language than an exclusion clause usually manages. First, a build tool touches the correctness of somebody else's software: keep your own checks, your own tests and your own backups running rather than treating an output as proven because a tool produced it. Second, technical writing on this site describes how a system behaves in the general case; it is not advice about your particular estate, and reading it is not a substitute for measuring your own.

Where you deal outside the course of a business, the statutory protections attaching to that position are not affected by anything in this part.

[liability]
never_excluded = ["death or injury through negligence",
                  "fraud",
                  "anything statute forbids excluding"]
business_losses = "excluded"
cap = "paid in the preceding 12 months, else GBP 100"

Some liability cannot be signed away and no attempt is made to sign it away here. If somebody dies or is injured because this company was negligent, that answers to the ordinary law. So does fraud, and so does any dishonest statement made to induce a deal. Anything else statute declares unexcludable stands equally untouched, and the rest of this part is read subject to those carve-outs.

Beyond those, and where you are using this site or the tooling for the purposes of a business: losses that are commercial in character sit outside what this company answers for. That covers profit you did not make, revenue or business you did not win, savings you expected and did not get, goodwill, reputation, and the cost of a broken build shipping something it should not have shipped. It covers loss or corruption of data and of software as well, which is precisely why part 12 asks you to keep your own copies. Losses of a knock-on or indirect kind are outside it too, however the claim is framed: in contract, in negligence, as a breach of some statutory duty, or otherwise.

For everything that remains, total liability under this document is capped at whatever you paid this company in the twelve months before the events complained of, and at one hundred pounds where nothing was paid at all. That figure is deliberately honest about what free published material can carry. Where a consulting engagement is involved, its own contract sets its own cap, which is negotiated against the actual work and displaces this one.

[withdrawal]
trigger = "part 6, or a legal requirement"
notice  = "given where circumstances allow"
refund  = "pro rata, where a fee was paid"

Access to anything published here can be blocked or withdrawn where part 6 is being broken, where the law requires it, or where continuing would put other people's systems at risk. Where the circumstances leave room for it, you get told first and given a chance to put the problem right; where an active attack is under way, they do not, and the explanation follows afterwards.

Where a fee had been paid for a period that withdrawal cuts short, the unused part is refunded on a proportionate basis, unless the withdrawal followed deliberate misuse. Parts 9, 10, 13 and 17 continue to apply after access ends, since each of them exists precisely for the period afterwards.

[engagement]
instrument = "separate signed contract"
precedence = "that contract, over this document"
scope      = "written and agreed before work starts"

Consulting work on another team's build system is not governed by this document. It runs on a contract written for the engagement, and where any line here conflicts with a line there, the engagement contract governs, for that client and for that piece of work.

What such a contract settles, at a minimum: the scope agreed in writing beforehand; the fee and when it falls due; who owns what is produced; confidentiality running in both directions; the data protection terms Article 28 requires, as part 3 of the privacy manifest describes; the liability cap for that work; and how either side ends it. None of that is settled by reading a web page, and no engagement begins on the strength of an exchange of emails alone.

The availability line on the front page is a statement about capacity at the time of writing. It is not an offer capable of acceptance, and no engagement exists until a contract is signed by both sides.

[mechanics]
whole_agreement = true
assignment_by_you = false
third_party_enforcement = false
severance = "offending line only"

Entire understanding. For the site and for released tooling, this document is the whole of what has been agreed, and it displaces anything said earlier on the same subjects. Nothing in this paragraph limits liability for a dishonest statement.

Handing the arrangement on. This company may transfer its side to a successor if the business is reorganised or sold, provided your position is not made worse by the transfer. You may not transfer yours without written agreement first.

Outsiders. Nobody who is not a party acquires any right to enforce a line of this document.

Severance. If a court finds a provision unenforceable, that provision is cut back to what it can lawfully be, or removed if it cannot be saved, and everything else stands.

Tolerance is not surrender. Declining to enforce something once, or taking time over it, keeps the right intact for later.

Conditions nobody controls. Neither side answers for failures caused by conditions genuinely outside their control, and a provider outage, a network failure, industrial action, a state measure or a natural event all count while they last.

Notices. Anything formal addressed to this company goes to the registered office; routine correspondence goes to the inbox in stanza 1. Notices to you go to the address you last wrote from.

[jurisdiction]
law    = "England and Wales"
forum  = "the English and Welsh courts"
first_step = "write, and expect a considered answer"

English law applies to this document, to the arrangement it records, and to any argument about either, including arguments that are not contractual in nature. A dispute belongs to the English and Welsh courts. If you live elsewhere in the United Kingdom and are dealing outside a business, nothing here removes your ability to bring proceedings where you live.

Before any of that, the cheaper route is usually to write. A complaint sent to hello@vairworks.co.uk gets read by a person and answered on its merits, and most disagreements about a published document turn out to be disagreements about what a sentence in it was meant to say.