Why isn't TerminalHire open source (yet)?

Fair question. TerminalHire asks you to build your credential by contributing to open source — so you deserve a straight answer about our own code. Here's the honest version.

It's deferred, not declined

TerminalHire is young and still finding its core. Open-sourcing a codebase that's changing every week — before you know which parts are load-bearing — mostly generates noise: stale forks, issues about code that no longer exists, and a license decision made before it's understood. I'd rather do it once, deliberately, than ship the gesture and regret the details.

The plan is open-core

When it happens, the parts that earn your trust go public: the matching engine and the CLI you actually run. The hosted side — the web app, the recruiter surface, monetization, the index infrastructure — stays private, under a source-available license: read it, audit it, run it locally; the commercial rights stay with us. That's the split that lets a small team keep the lights on while staying inspectable exactly where it counts — in the code that touches your data.

What has to be true first

Real traction (the tool earning its keep with working developers, not a launch spike), a full git-history scrub, secret rotation, and an outside security review. Rough target: early 2027. I'd sooner move that date than publish a repository that leaks a key or someone's data on day one.

What you can verify today — without waiting for any of that

• Your profile leaves only when you send it, after you confirm in the browser — see the privacy architecture for what each step sends.
• That's enforced, not just promised. The CLI ships a zero-egress allowlist in its own test suite, so a new network call in the CLI's own files has to be justified in review before it can merge. The scan covers those files, not the packages bundled into them.
• The CLI you install is unminified JavaScript on npm. It is one bundle rather than the source tree, but nothing stops you from reading it right now.

I'm genuinely wrestling with the timing here. If shipping closed-source-for-now is a dealbreaker for you, I understand — and I'd rather tell you exactly where we stand than pretend the question away.