SOP Maker — Licence

Copyright © 2026 Jakub Rimek. All rights reserved.

SOP Maker is free to use. It is not open source, and it is not in the public domain.
This licence lets anybody use the tool and everything it produces, for any purpose including a
commercial one, while keeping the software and the artwork the author's to license as he chooses.

This is a plain-English licence written by the author, not by a solicitor. If you are relying on it
for anything that matters, take your own advice.

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1. What you may do

Use it, free, for anything. Open it in a browser, install it, run it offline, use it inside a
company, use it to produce documents you sell or that support a business you are paid for. No fee, no
account, no registration, no limit on how many people use it or how many procedures you write.

Keep what you make. Every Standard Operating Procedure you create is yours. Your words, your
photographs, your chemical data, your procedures — the author claims no ownership of and no rights
over anything you author with this tool, and no licence to it. Your SOPs never leave your machine
in any case.

Share the procedures you make, freely. An exported SOP is a single HTML file that necessarily
contains the pictograms it displays. You may copy, print, laminate, email, host and distribute your
exported procedures without restriction, and you may pass them to customers, auditors, contractors
and staff. Distributing the icons inside an SOP you made with this tool is expressly permitted and
always will be. So is printing them.

Read the source. The whole program ships as readable source, deliberately, so that anyone can
verify the claim that nothing is uploaded. You are welcome to read it, study it, audit it, and quote
short extracts when discussing or reviewing it.

Use it across your organisation. You may copy SOP Maker onto as many of your own computers as you
like, and host it on your own internal network, shared drive or intranet for your own staff and
contractors to use. That is how it is meant to be run on a site with no internet on the floor. What
§2 prohibits is supplying it to people outside your organisation, or as a product.

Use the starter content. The example department and site CSV files, the starter procedures and the
example SOP are yours to edit, extend and use as you see fit.

2. What you may not do

Do not redistribute the software. You may not copy, republish, mirror, host, bundle, sell,
sub-license, rent or otherwise supply SOP Maker itself — in whole or in substantial part, modified or
unmodified — to anyone else. Point people at the official site instead.

Do not sell it, or anything substantially derived from it. You may not offer SOP Maker, a
rebranded version, a modified version, or a product substantially based on its source as a product or
a paid service.

Do not take the icon set out of the tool. The pictograms are the author's own work and are
licensed for use within SOP Maker and within the procedures it produces (§1). They may not be
extracted, re-published, re-sold, or reused in other products, icon packs, templates or design
systems.

Do not remove the notices. Copyright lines, this licence, and the authorship information in the
source and on the exported procedures stay where they are.

3. No warranty, and the limit of liability

SOP Maker is provided "as is", with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including
fitness for a particular purpose.

Read this part twice if you work in food manufacturing. A Standard Operating Procedure is a
controlled document and the responsibility for its content is entirely yours. This tool helps you
write, number, format and file one. It does not verify that a procedure is safe, that a chemical is
suitable, that a contact time is correct, or that a document satisfies your standard, your auditor or
the law. The author accepts no liability for any loss, damage, contamination, product recall, audit
finding, enforcement action or injury arising from the use of this software or from the content of
any document produced with it.

Nothing in this licence limits liability where the law does not permit it to be limited.

4. Everything else is reserved

A version already released under this licence stays licensed under it. Changing the terms later
does not reach back and does not take away what this licence has already given you.

Any right not expressly granted above stays with the author, including the right to change these terms
for future versions, to license SOP Maker to others on different terms, and to sell or transfer it.

5. If you want to do something this licence forbids

Ask. Permission is one email away, and is often given — the restrictions here exist to stop the work
being repackaged and sold by someone else, not to make it awkward to use.

Jakub Rimek — https://rimek.uk

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Why it is written this way

The point of SOP Maker is that a small food business should not have to pay for a decent Standard
Operating Procedure, and that a hygiene team should be able to check for themselves that their data
is not being shipped anywhere. Free use and readable source deliver both.

Neither of those requires giving the product away to a competitor, and a permissive open-source
licence would do exactly that. So: read it, use it, keep what you make, share your procedures — but
the software and the artwork stay the author's.
