How we vet

We only list legitimate software. Every tool is checked against seven criteria before it appears, and re-checked on each release.

Open licence – OSI-approved, with any open-core boundaries mapped.
Clean-room provenance – no decompiled, disassembled or leaked code.
No trademarked or proprietary assets – logos, icons, fonts, presets, manual text.
No circumvention – no DRM or licence-server bypass, no activation cracks.
Research method disclosed – how the original was studied.
Patent and trade-dress flags – shown as caveats, not a block.
Security basics – signed builds, security policy, open CVEs.

Green Verified legitimate. Passes criteria 1–4 with no open questions on 5.

Amber Listed, under review. Licence is fine, but provenance or research-method questions remain. Shown with caveats; never hosted by us.

Red Excluded. Decompiled or leaked code, circumvention, trademark misuse, or no licence. Not listed or linked.

Not vetted Proprietary free tools (e.g. Photopea, Affinity) are listed for completeness but our open-source criteria do not apply to them.

Our rules

All statuses are currently provisional pending review by a UK IP solicitor.
Sponsorship cannot buy a badge or change a ranking.
Maintainers can respond to any status; changes will be logged publicly.

UK basis: CDPA 1988 s.50BA permits observing, studying and testing a program while running it; SAS Institute v World Programming held that functionality and file formats are not protected by copyright. This page is not legal advice.