Copyright, and what you may do with this

The short version is first and it is not a summary — it is the promise. The formal text follows for anyone who needs it.

In plain words

It stays free to patients. Permanently. Not free for now, not free until somebody buys us. If this work is ever licensed, sold, or inherited by anyone else, that condition goes with it and they are bound by it too.
Read it, print it, use it. Take any of it to your own appointment, give it to your family, hand it to your doctor. That is what it is for and you need no permission from us.
Quote it, with a line saying where it came from. A page, a passage, a grade, a question — use it in your own writing and say where you got it, so your reader can come and check it.
Selling it is different, and you must ask. Putting this work, or anything built on it, inside a product people pay for needs written permission from us first. We may say no, and we do not have to say why.
Do not put it behind a paywall or a sign-up. Not ours and not a copy of ours. The one thing we will always act on is somebody charging a patient for what we gave away.
The medical content is not advice, and never becomes it. Nothing here is a diagnosis and nothing here replaces your own doctor. That is stated on the pages and it is a term here as well.

These say the same thing as the formal text below. If they ever disagree, this short version wins.

The notice

The terms

Quoted from the VSI Health Profile License, settled 24 May 2026. The wording is reproduced rather than paraphrased, because a paraphrased licence is a different licence.

Patient commitment

This work is and will remain free to patients. This commitment is binding on VSI and any licensees, acquirers, or successors.

Commercial licensing

Commercial use requires licensing from VSI. Terms are at VSI’s sole discretion and may be modified at any time with 30 days written notice.

Reserved rights

Vermont Synergy Initiative reserves the absolute right to:

Modify any and all license terms at our sole discretion
Revoke commercial licenses for any reason
Change pricing, terms, or conditions with 30 days notice
Refuse licensing to any entity for any reason
Terminate partnerships or integrations
Alter the commercial licensing structure entirely
Add, remove, or modify any terms or conditions
Exercise any rights not explicitly granted to others

Control retention

Fred Schwacke and Vermont Synergy Initiative retain complete and absolute control over license terms and modifications, commercial partnership decisions, enforcement discretion, technology direction, and any decisions regarding this work.

No automatic rights

No commercial entity has any automatic right to license this technology, to continue using it, to favourable terms or conditions, to renewal of any licensing agreement, or to any use whatsoever without explicit written permission.

Why it is shaped this way

Two things have to be true at once, and one alone would not do it.

The commitment to patients has to survive us. A promise that only lasts as long as the current owner is not a promise; it is an intention. So it binds anyone who ever acquires this work, which is the point of writing it down rather than saying it.

And the commercial side has to stay under our control — not to extract money from it, but so that a company cannot take this, put it inside something people pay for, and leave us with no way to stop them. The reserved rights are the instrument for that and nothing else.

If those two ever pull against each other, the first one wins. It is the reason the rest exists.

What you send us

If you write to us through a page here — a correction, a question, a comment — you keep everything you wrote. You are not signing it over by sending it.

What we may do with it is set by the consent tier you chose at the time, and by nothing else. Counted and anonymous is the default and stays the default unless you say otherwise. We do not publish anybody’s words, or name anybody, without the specific permission for that.

Other people’s work

Where a claim here comes from published research, the source is named and the grade for how good that evidence is travels with it. Those authors own their own work; we quote and cite it, we do not claim it.

The site is built with open-source software, which stays under its own licences. Where we link to other services — a helpline, a government site, a patient charity — those are theirs, not ours, and we say so where we link.

Reaching us about any of this. Licensing questions, permission requests, and anything that needs a signature go to Fred Schwacke, Vermont Synergy Initiative, Bondville, Vermont. A published address for these will appear here when there is one; the comment rail in the margin reaches us in the meantime.

If we change these terms, the change is dated on this page and the previous version stays readable underneath it. A quiet edit to a promise is how a promise stops being one.