Synomy Notes
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The licence.

The terms you use Synomy under, written to be read. What you may do with it, what stays yours, what we promise, and what the law promises you wherever you live.

Version 1.0 · In force from 30 October 2026 · Belgian law

This is the agreement between you and us about Synomy. It is written to be read, so please do. We and us means Lars Lagauw, who makes and publishes Synomy in Belgium with the people who build it with him (section 21 says how to reach us). You means the person using Synomy, and the organisation they use it for, if any.

The short version

  • Your notes, recordings and files are yours. This licence gives us no rights in them.
  • Install Synomy on every computer you own or control, and pass unchanged copies on to anyone.
  • Use it at home, at school, for a cause, and, while Synomy is in beta, at work.
  • Don't pass on a changed Synomy, don't pass it off as yours, and don't use it to harm anyone.
  • Synomy is a beta and comes as it is. We answer for what we do on purpose or through gross negligence, and the law where you live may give you more. Nothing here takes that away.
  • A version you have keeps the licence it came with. New terms only ever come with a new version.

1. What this licence covers

It covers the Synomy app: the programs we publish for Mac, Windows and any other system, the updates we sign for them, the extensions we publish in Synomy's Store under our own name, and the documentation that comes with them. Together, Synomy.

It does not cover:

  • what you make with Synomy, which is yours (section 3);
  • the open-source software and AI models in Synomy or fetched by it, which come under their own licences (section 12);
  • extensions by other makers, which come under their makers' terms;
  • outside services you connect Synomy to, such as an AI service you give it a key for, which come under the terms you agreed with them.

2. Accepting it

By installing or using Synomy you accept this licence. If you don't accept it, don't install or use Synomy. If you use Synomy for an organisation, you accept it for that organisation too, and you confirm you may.

3. Your work is yours

Everything you write, record, import or make with Synomy (your content) belongs to you, or to whoever it belonged to before. This licence gives us no rights in it, and we don't need any: Synomy keeps your content on your own computers and sends it only where you send it (section 9).

You are responsible for your content and for what you share. That includes recording people: in many places you need the consent of everybody you record, and you need it before you press Record.

4. What you may do

We give you a licence to:

  1. install and run Synomy on any number of computers you own or control, for the uses in section 5;
  2. make the copies that takes, including backups;
  3. pass unchanged copies of Synomy on to other people, the way Synomy itself hands a signed copy to a friend, or by sharing the installer we publish. You may not charge for them. Everybody who gets a copy gets their own licence from us, on these terms.

The licence is worldwide, not exclusive, and lasts until it ends under section 16. We can't take it back for any other reason.

5. Who may use it, and for what

  • Personal use. Anything you do for yourself, your family and your friends.
  • Learning and research. Students, teachers and researchers, at a school, a university, a research institution or on their own.
  • Causes. Charities, associations and other non-profit organisations, and their volunteers and staff.
  • Work. Use by or for a business: a company, a self-employed person, a freelancer or any other organisation that trades, and its staff and contractors, for its work. Every version of Synomy published as a beta (its version number says beta) may be used for work under this licence, for as long as you keep using that version.

When Synomy leaves beta, we may publish terms for work use of the versions after it, and work use of those versions will then need them. We will say so on synomy.net and in the release notes before the first version that needs them is published. The version you have stays yours under this licence: you can switch off updates and keep using it (section 8).

6. What you may not do

You may not, and may not help anyone else to:

  1. change, patch or repackage Synomy and pass the changed version on, or present a changed version as Synomy;
  2. remove or change the copyright notices in Synomy, this licence, or the notices of the parts in section 12;
  3. sell, rent or lend Synomy, or run it for others as a hosted service;
  4. take Synomy apart to copy its code or design into another product, except as section 7 allows;
  5. get around Synomy's signatures, its update checks or the Store's, or present anything as signed by us that we did not sign;
  6. use Synomy, or the computers running it, to break the law, to get into computers or accounts you have no right to, to flood or harm other people's computers, to impersonate anybody, or to spread malicious software;
  7. use the name Synomy or our logo for something we didn't make, beyond saying truthfully that your work runs on or works with Synomy. This licence gives you no other rights in our name or logo.

7. Rights the law gives you anyway

Some rights belong to every lawful user of a program, and no licence can take them away. In the European Union they come from articles 5 and 6 of Directive 2009/24/EC on the legal protection of computer programs, which Belgium made law in articles XI.299 to XI.301 of its Code of Economic Law. They include:

  • loading and running Synomy, and correcting its errors where you need to in order to use it as intended;
  • making a backup copy of Synomy;
  • watching, studying and testing how Synomy works, to understand the ideas behind it, while you use it as this licence allows;
  • decompiling the parts of Synomy needed to make another program work with it, when that information isn't already available to you. Ask us first: we may simply give it to you.

Where the law where you live gives you rights like these, this licence never limits them.

8. Updates and versions

Synomy updates itself. A new version comes from a friend who already has it or from our releases page, and Synomy installs it only if it carries our signature. You can switch this off in Settings › Updates.

Each version of Synomy comes with the licence in force when it was published. A later licence applies to the versions published after it, never to a version you already have, unless it only gives you more.

We look after the newest version, and security fixes never cost anything. We don't promise to fix older versions, or that an older version keeps working with newer ones: sharing with friends needs versions that speak the same language. Keeping Synomy up to date is how you get its fixes.

9. Privacy: what leaves your computer

We built Synomy so that your content stays on computers you choose. This is what does leave yours, and who sees it. For the counts below, we are the controller under the EU's data protection law (GDPR).

  • To the people you share with: the pages, files, meetings and live edits you share, sealed on your computer so only those people can open them.
  • Sealed copies: while a friend you share with is offline, your changes can wait for them, sealed, on up to four other computers: your own, your friends', or those of people who chose to keep copies for others. Your computer may keep sealed changes for others in the same way, for up to two weeks. Nobody who keeps them can read them.
  • Finding each other: to reach a friend, your computer asks public introducers where their computer is, and those introducers see your computer's network (IP) address, as on any internet connection. When computers can't reach each other directly, sealed traffic may go through the Tor network or through another Synomy user's computer.
  • Updates: Synomy fetches new versions from GitHub (Microsoft), which sees your network address.
  • Counts: unless you switch off Count this computer in Settings › Diagnostics, Synomy sends, once a day it is used, a random number made on your computer, its version and platform, the days it was used and how often each part of Synomy was used. Never your content, names or anything you typed. Our counter on Cloudflare receives them; it uses your network address only to limit how often it is asked, and keeps it nowhere. We count to learn which parts of Synomy people use, which is our legitimate interest (GDPR article 6(1)(f)), and every number we make from the counts is public at synomy.net/stats. Each computer's daily rows are deleted after 400 days. Switching counting off deletes the random number and the counts on your computer, and nothing more is sent.
  • Services you connect: an AI service or another program you connect gets what you send it, under its own terms.
  • This website is hosted by Google (Firebase) and loads its fonts from Google Fonts, which see your network address. It sets no cookies and runs no trackers.

You have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, and to object to the counting, which you can also do yourself by switching it off. We can't tell your counts apart from anybody else's without the random number on your computer, so usually we hold nothing we can find as yours. If you think we handle data wrongly, tell us (section 21), or complain to your data protection authority; in Belgium, the Data Protection Authority.

10. Extensions and the Store

Synomy's Store offers extensions, each with a page that says what it does and what it may do on your computer. Extensions we publish under our own name are covered by this licence. Extensions by other makers come under their makers' terms. Some extensions fetch an AI model, which comes under its own licence (section 12).

11. Connecting other programs

Synomy can let programs on your own computer read and change your pages (the local API), and send events to web addresses you choose (webhooks). The programs and addresses you allow get what you give them access to. Choosing them is up to you, and so is what they do with it.

12. Open-source software and AI models

Synomy is built with open-source software and runs open AI models, each under its own licence. For those parts their licences apply instead of this one, and nothing in this licence limits what they allow you.

The AI models Synomy can download and run on your computer, and their licences:

  • Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, speech recognition, by NVIDIA: CC BY 4.0, converted to ONNX to run on your computer.
  • Whistle, speech recognition on the Needle engine, by Cactus Compute: Apache 2.0.
  • pyannote segmentation 3.0, telling voices apart, by pyannote: MIT.
  • WeSpeaker CAM++, recognising voices, by WeNet, trained on VoxCeleb: CC BY 4.0.
  • multilingual-e5-small, search by meaning, by Microsoft: MIT.
  • EmbeddingGemma 300M, an optional model for search by meaning, by Google: the Gemma Terms of Use. Choosing it means you accept those terms and Google's Prohibited Use Policy.
  • GLiNER2.5, finding names (the Index extension), by Fastino: the licence on its model page.
  • Supertonic 3, the voice of the Read aloud extension, by Supertone: the BigScience Open RAIL-M licence. Using the voice means you accept its use restrictions, which the extension lists.

What a model makes for you, a transcript, a summary or a voice, is yours to check: models make mistakes.

13. Synomy as it is

Synomy is a beta. It is still being built, and it can have faults, lose work, or stop working with older versions. Keep backups of what matters to you.

As far as the law allows, Synomy is provided "as is" and "as available", without any warranty, express or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. This section never limits section 14 or your rights under section 15.

14. Our responsibility

  1. We are liable without limit for harm we cause on purpose or through gross negligence, for fraud, for death or injury to anybody's body or health that we cause, and wherever a law that no contract can set aside makes us liable, such as the product liability law of your country.
  2. Apart from point 1: if we breach, through ordinary negligence, a duty this licence rests on and you may rely on us to meet, we are liable only for the harm that was typical and foreseeable when you got Synomy.
  3. Apart from points 1 and 2, we are not liable for harm caused by our ordinary negligence. Where the law where you live limits our liability further because we gave you Synomy without charge, that limit applies too.
  4. Apart from point 1, where we are liable for lost data, it is for what it would have cost to restore it from the backups you could reasonably have kept.

15. Your rights where you live

If you use Synomy as a consumer, the law where you live may give you rights that no contract can take away. This licence never takes them away, even where it chooses Belgian law or says as far as the law allows. Any part of it that would, does not apply to you to that extent.

16. When it ends

You may stop using Synomy and remove it whenever you like.

If you break this licence and we tell you how, you have 30 days to put it right. If you do, your licence goes on as if nothing happened. If you don't, or you break it in the same way again, your licence ends. Then stop using Synomy and remove it. Your content stays yours, and so do the licences of the people you passed a copy to.

Sections 3, 7, 13, 14, 15 and 20 keep applying after your licence ends.

17. Changes to this licence

We may publish a new version of this licence with a new version of Synomy. It applies to that version and the ones after it (section 8), and every earlier version of the licence stays readable at synomy.net/licence. If a new version of the licence takes anything away from you, we will say so in the release notes before that version of Synomy is published, so you can choose not to update.

18. Export controls and sanctions

Synomy contains strong encryption. You may not take, send or use Synomy where the sanctions or export rules of the European Union or the United Nations forbid it, or give it to people they forbid it to. Nothing here asks you to break the EU Blocking Statute or a similar law.

19. Passing the licence on

We intend to set up a company to carry Synomy on. We may transfer our rights and duties under this licence to it, and by accepting this licence you agree to that. Your rights stay exactly as they are, and this licence will name the company.

You may not transfer your licence, but everybody you pass a copy to gets their own (section 4).

20. Law and courts

Belgian law governs this licence, without its rules on which country's law applies, and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

If you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the law of the country you live in (section 15). You may take a dispute to the courts where you live, and we can take one against you only there. Otherwise, the courts of Belgium decide disputes about this licence.

21. Who we are and how to reach us

Lars Lagauw makes and publishes Synomy in Belgium. Write to hello@synomy.net about this licence, your data, or a security problem. If you find a security problem, please tell us before you tell anybody else, so we can fix it first.

22. The rest

  • This licence is the whole agreement between you and us about Synomy.
  • If a part of it is invalid, or can't be enforced against you, the rest still applies, and the law fills the gap.
  • If we don't enforce a part of it at once, we have not given it up.
  • The English text is the original. A translation we publish is there to help you read it, unless the law where you live makes a translation binding.
  • The headings and the short version help you find your way. The numbered sections are the licence.

Earlier versions

Versions of Synomy published before this licence came with a short draft licence. We now license them under this licence too, because it gives you more than the draft did.

This text is the same at synomy.net/licence and in Synomy's repositories.