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Why isn't Terminal Hire open source (yet)?

Fair question. Terminal Hire 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

Terminal Hire 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 never leaves your machine. That's the guarantee, absolutely — see the privacy architecture for how.
  • That's enforced, not just promised. The CLI ships a zero-egress allowlist in its own test suite, so any new network call has to be justified in review before it can merge.
  • The CLI you install is plain, inspectable JavaScript on npm. 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.