Terms of use

What you may do with Ferrum, and what it does not promise you.

Last updated 7 September 2026

These terms cover the Ferrum editor, this website and the marketplace. Downloading the editor, creating an account or installing a package means accepting them. Ferrum is run by one person, so they are written plainly rather than at length.

Ferrum is beta software

This matters more than anything else here, so it is first. Ferrum is unfinished, and every build is published on that understanding:

It can crash, hang, or behave differently from one release to the next.
It can lose work. Do not use it as the only place an unsaved change exists, and keep anything you care about in version control.
Features can change or be removed without notice, and settings can stop being honoured.
Releases can be withdrawn, and stored data — synced settings, snippets, activity totals — can be reset if a format has to change.
The service can be taken down, for a while or for good.

If none of that is acceptable for what you are doing, Ferrum is not the right tool for it yet.

Using the editor

You may install and use Ferrum on as many computers as you like, for anything you like, including work you are paid for. That permission is personal to you, is not exclusive, and can be withdrawn if these terms are broken.

Ferrum is not open source. You may not resell it, redistribute modified builds as though they were Ferrum, or strip its name and ship it as your own. Nothing here restricts what you write with it: your code is yours, and no claim is made over anything you edit, build or publish using the editor.

Accounts

An account is optional — the editor works without one — and is for a single person. Keep your password and any connected editor's credentials to yourself; anything done through your account is treated as done by you. If you think a credential has leaked, revoke it from your devices and change your password.

Do not create accounts automatically, do not create one to evade a block, and give a real address you can receive mail at, since it is how you sign in.

Plugins and themes are other people's work

The marketplace is a shelf, not a workshop. Almost everything on it is written and uploaded by people who have nothing to do with Ferrum, and it is worth being blunt about what that means.

Packages are not reviewed, audited or scanned. Being listed is not an endorsement and is not a safety check.
A plugin runs with the same access to your machine that the editor has. It can read and write your files. Install one because you trust the person who wrote it, not because it was on the shelf.
A package is licensed by whoever published it, on whatever terms they state. Those terms govern your use of it, not these.
Anything that goes wrong because of a package — lost work, a leak, a bad edit across a repository — is between you and its publisher.

Publishing to the marketplace

By publishing, you confirm that you have the right to, and that:

The code is yours to distribute, or you are licensed to distribute it.
It contains no malware, no miner, no credential harvester, and nothing that damages, spies on or deceives the person who installs it.
It does not impersonate another package, another publisher, or Ferrum itself.
Its description says what it actually does.

You keep ownership of what you publish. You grant permission to host it, list it, and hand it to anybody who installs it — which is what publishing to a registry means, and it lasts as long as it is installed somewhere.

A package can be withdrawn or a version pulled at any time, by you or by the operator, and a version that is already installed keeps working. Because people depend on what they installed, withdrawing a package hides it from the storefront rather than deleting it.

What you may not do

Break into, overload or probe the service, or work around its limits.
Use somebody else's account, or use the marketplace to distribute malware.
Upload anything unlawful, or anything you do not hold the rights to.
Automate the site or the API in a way that degrades it for everybody else.

No warranty

Ferrum is provided as it is, with no warranty of any kind — express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a purpose and non-infringement. It is not promised to be uninterrupted, error-free, secure against every attack, or to keep your data intact. This is not boilerplate softening a claim made elsewhere: no such claim is made anywhere.

Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, no liability is accepted for lost work, lost profit, lost data, business interruption, or any indirect or consequential loss arising from using Ferrum, the site, the marketplace or anything installed from it. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Since Ferrum is free during the beta, there is no fee to refund and no paid support to fall back on.

Suspension and termination

An account can be disabled, and a machine blocked, where these terms have been broken or where the service is being abused. Where it is practical to say why, you will be told why. A machine block is kept after the account it came from goes, because the point of it is that a new account does not undo it.

You can stop at any time: uninstall the editor, revoke its credentials from your devices, and write to privacy@example.com to have the account removed. What removal can and cannot reach is set out on the privacy page.

Changes

These terms will change as Ferrum does. The date at the top says when they last did. Continuing to use Ferrum after a change means accepting the new version; if you would rather not, stop using it and ask for the account to be removed.

Getting in touch

privacy@example.com. The privacy page covers what is recorded and for how long.