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Open source notices

This page is about the open-source components inside Heeler. Heeler's own code is under the Mozilla Public License 2.0; the materials on this page retain their own licenses.

Heeler is built on other people's work. This page says whose, under what terms, and where to get the parts you are entitled to.

RAW files

Heeler develops RAW files with its own decoder, written in Rust for Heeler and under Heeler's own license. (GoPro's VC-5 codec, below, is the one part ported from another project.)

The decoder's color for each camera is data, not code. For most cameras it is the pair of calibrations a converter writes into the camera profile of the DNG files it makes. For cameras no converter reads, it is a matrix measured from developed sample files of the camera.

libjpeg

The frames the viewer shows while you edit are encoded with mozjpeg, a libjpeg-turbo derivative, © the Independent JPEG Group and contributors, under the IJG and BSD-3-Clause licenses.

The IJG license asks for one sentence in particular, so here it is in the words it asks for:

This software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.

The library has not been altered.

The IJG's terms, as the Independent JPEG Group's README states them:

The authors make NO WARRANTY or representation, either express or implied,
with respect to this software, its quality, accuracy, merchantability, or
fitness for a particular purpose.  This software is provided "AS IS", and you,
its user, assume the entire risk as to its quality and accuracy.

This software is copyright (C) 1991-2020, Thomas G. Lane, Guido Vollbeding.
All Rights Reserved except as specified below.

Permission is hereby granted to use, copy, modify, and distribute this
software (or portions thereof) for any purpose, without fee, subject to these
conditions:
(1) If any part of the source code for this software is distributed, then this
README file must be included, with this copyright and no-warranty notice
unaltered; and any additions, deletions, or changes to the original files
must be clearly indicated in accompanying documentation.
(2) If only executable code is distributed, then the accompanying
documentation must state that "this software is based in part on the work of
the Independent JPEG Group".
(3) Permission for use of this software is granted only if the user accepts
full responsibility for any undesirable consequences; the authors accept
NO LIABILITY for damages of any kind.

These conditions apply to any software derived from or based on the IJG code,
not just to the unmodified library.  If you use our work, you ought to
acknowledge us.

Permission is NOT granted for the use of any IJG author's name or company name
in advertising or publicity relating to this software or products derived from
it.  This software may be referred to only as "the Independent JPEG Group's
software".

We specifically permit and encourage the use of this software as the basis of
commercial products, provided that all warranty or liability claims are
assumed by the product vendor.

JPEG XL

Newer DNG files, both the lossy ones and floating-point HDR merges, store their pixels as JPEG XL. Heeler reads those with jxl-oxide, © its authors, under the MIT or Apache-2.0 licenses, at your option.

The library has not been altered.

GoPro VC-5 decoder

GoPro GPR files compress their pixels with GoPro's VC-5 codec. Heeler decodes them with its own Rust port of the VC-5 decoder from GoPro's GPR SDK, © 2018 GoPro, Inc., offered under the Apache-2.0 or MIT licenses at your option; Heeler takes the MIT option. Only the decoder is ported, not the rest of the SDK.

The port decodes a sound file to the same pixels as GoPro's decoder, and reports a damaged GPR as damaged instead of closing the app: it checks that it stays inside the file it is reading and that the sizes and counts in the file's own header are ones it can hold (its image size must match the one the GPR declares). How it relates to GoPro's code is described in third_party/gpr-vc5/README.md in Heeler's repository.

The MIT license asks that its text travel with the software:

Copyright 2018 GoPro, Inc.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

mimalloc

Heeler's memory is managed by mimalloc, © 2018-2025 Microsoft Corporation and Daan Leijen, under the MIT license, built in from source through the libmimalloc-sys crate. It hands memory Heeler has finished with back to the system sooner than the built-in allocator, which keeps large exports lighter.

The library has not been altered. The MIT license asks that its text travel with the software:

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2018-2025 Microsoft Corporation, Daan Leijen

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

libwebp

WebP exports and the media server's frames are encoded by libwebp 1.3.1, © 2010 Google Inc., under the BSD-3-Clause license, built in from source through the libwebp-sys crate. The library has not been altered. Its license asks that its text travel with the software, and Google grants a patent license for it, reproduced as it comes:

Copyright (c) 2010, Google Inc. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:

  * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

  * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
    the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
    distribution.

  * Neither the name of Google nor the names of its contributors may
    be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
    without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT
HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE
OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Additional IP Rights Grant (Patents)
------------------------------------

"These implementations" means the copyrightable works that implement the WebM
codecs distributed by Google as part of the WebM Project.

Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge,
royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to
make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise
run, modify and propagate the contents of these implementations of WebM, where
such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by
Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily
infringed by these implementations of WebM. This grant does not include claims
that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these
implementations. If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order
or agree to the institution of patent litigation or any other patent
enforcement activity against any entity (including a cross-claim or
counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any of these implementations of WebM
or any code incorporated within any of these implementations of WebM
constitute direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of
patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License
for these implementations of WebM shall terminate as of the date such
litigation is filed.

OpenEXR

Renders and HDR merges saved as OpenEXR are read with exrs (the exr crate), a pure-Rust implementation of the format, © Contributors to the exrs Project, under the BSD-3-Clause license, which asks that this notice travel with the binary. The crate is not affiliated with the OpenEXR project or the Academy Software Foundation, whose format specification and sample images are likewise BSD-3-Clause, © Contributors to the OpenEXR Project. The Cryptomatte convention Heeler reads for object mattes is © Psyop Media Company, LLC, also BSD-3-Clause.

The library has not been altered.

Lensfun lens database

Heeler ships a snapshot of the lensfun project's lens database: the XML files that describe lenses and their optical corrections, used to recognize the lens a photograph was taken with. The database is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Copyright © the lensfun project and its contributors, https://lensfun.github.io/

Only the database is included. The lensfun software library is not part of Heeler: the files are read by Heeler's own code. The bundled snapshot is unmodified; if Heeler ever ships an edited copy, the edits will be published under the same license, as Share Alike requires. The snapshot's origin and revision are recorded in the lensfun-db folder that ships inside the app.

Machine-learning models (downloaded, not bundled)

The smart selection, depth and noise-reduction tools, and the assistant's optional picture reader, use machine-learning models that are not part of the installer. Each is downloaded only when you ask, from the source the download dialog names, and verified against a checksum pinned in the app before it is trusted. Every model also has a second source, a mirror of the same published files on Vagabond Burro's own release page, tried when the first does not answer; the checksum is the same either way. A downloaded model lives in Heeler's data folder and can be installed, updated or removed from Preferences (see Downloaded models).

  • SAM 2.1 Hiera Tiny (Segment Anything 2.1: the clicks, Subject and Sky of every smart selection made since Heeler 2026.7), © Meta Platforms, under the Apache License 2.0: code and weights alike; ONNX packaging by the Hugging Face onnx-community. Its training data (SA-V) is published by Meta under CC-BY-4.0.

  • MobileSAM (the Segment Anything image encoder, distilled) and the Segment Anything mask decoder, © Meta AI and the MobileSAM authors, under the Apache License 2.0: code and weights alike. The training data (SA-1B) is published by Meta under its own stated terms. It is kept for the smart selections made with it before 2026.7, which it recomputes exactly as they were made.

  • BiRefNet dynamic (the one-shot subject matte) and BiRefNet Lite (the subject matte before it, kept for selections made with it), © Zheng Peng and the BiRefNet authors, under the MIT license: code and weights alike; ONNX packaging by the Hugging Face onnx-community. Their training corpus (DIS5K and related academic datasets) is academic in origin; the weights are published by the author under MIT, and Heeler uses them as published.

  • LaMa (the fill behind Remove and the Finish Fill brush), © Samsung AI Center and the LaMa authors, under the Apache License 2.0: code and weights alike; ONNX packaging by Carve, also Apache-2.0. Its training corpus (Places2) is academic in origin, with research-oriented terms; the weights are published under Apache-2.0 and Heeler uses them as published. The fill only ever synthesizes pixels inside a mask you made on purpose, and only on your machine.

  • ViTMatte (the Smart matte in Selection Polish), © the Hust Vision Lab and the ViTMatte authors: the code under the MIT license, the published weights under the Apache License 2.0; ONNX packaging by Xenova. Its training corpus (Composition-1k) is academic in origin; the weights are published as stated on the author's model card, and Heeler uses them as published. The matte reads only the photograph and your own selection, on your machine.

  • Depth Anything V2 Small (the scene-depth plane behind Fog, Depth Lighting, Depth of Field, and depth-range selections), © the Depth Anything authors, under the Apache License 2.0: code and weights alike; ONNX packaging by the Hugging Face onnx-community. Only the Small variant of V2 is used: V2's Base and Large weights carry a non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) license and are deliberately not offered. The plane is relative depth computed from your photograph, on your machine.

  • Depth Anything 3 Mono Large (DA3MONO-LARGE, the Depth Map's larger model, on the desktop), © ByteDance Ltd. and the Depth Anything 3 authors, under the Apache License 2.0: code and the DA3MONO-LARGE weights alike. No ONNX build of it is published, so the file Heeler downloads is Heeler's own export of the published weights, with the transformer's weights stored at 8-bit precision; that change is stated where the file is mirrored. Only this monocular model is offered: the larger multi-view Depth Anything 3 models carry a non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) license and are not.

  • MoGe-2 ViT-S (the surface normals behind Depth Lighting's Model choice), © Microsoft Corporation and the MoGe authors, under the MIT license: code and weights alike, and the ONNX export is the authors' own; its DINOv2 backbone is © Meta AI under the Apache License 2.0. It was trained on public synthetic and captured 3D datasets, academic in origin; the weights are published under MIT and Heeler uses them as published. Only its normals are used, read from your photograph on your machine; the depth map stays Depth Anything's.

  • SCUNet (Noise Reduction's Model method), © Kai Zhang and the SCUNet authors, under the Apache License 2.0: code and weights alike (the weight release in the KAIR repository is under MIT); ONNX packaging by Heliosoph, also Apache-2.0. It was trained on synthesized noise over public image sets, academic in origin; the weights are published as stated and Heeler uses them as published. The model reads only your photograph, on your machine.

  • Florence-2 base (what the assistant knows is in a photograph: captions, objects and where a phrase is; and where the phrase typed into Select by text is), © Microsoft Corporation, under the MIT license: code and weights alike; ONNX packaging by the Hugging Face onnx-community, also MIT. It was trained on FLD-5B, Microsoft's own dataset of 126 million images with 5.4 billion annotations, which Microsoft made largely with its own models and filtered; the weights are published under MIT and Heeler uses them as published. It reads only the frame on screen, on your machine.

The models are run by ONNX Runtime (© Microsoft, MIT) through the ort bindings (MIT or Apache-2.0). Nothing your photographs contain is uploaded for these models' inference: each runs on your machine. The optional assistant can send text measurements and descriptions of the photograph to the model server you choose on your computer or local network, as described in the Privacy Policy.

Rust and JavaScript libraries

Heeler links several hundred open-source Rust crates and bundles a few JavaScript libraries, nearly all of them under the MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD or Zlib licenses. Those licenses ask that their text travel with a binary built from them, so every one of them is reproduced, crate by crate, on the Third-party notices page beside this one. That page is generated from the exact crates the macOS, Windows and Linux builds link, and a test fails when a crate is added without regenerating it.

Terms and warranties

The components above are provided by their own authors as is, with no warranty of any kind. Their licenses say so, and nothing here changes that.

Any warranty, support or liability that Heeler offers you is offered by Heeler alone. It does not come from the Independent JPEG Group, or any other author whose work is named on this page, and none of them takes on any obligation to you because their code is inside Heeler. Heeler indemnifies them against any claim arising from terms Heeler has offered.

Heeler itself

Heeler's own code is open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The license does not replace the separate licenses of the components, fixtures or downloaded models described here, and grants no rights to the Heeler name or logo (Heeler name and logo).

The source repository includes an unmodified JPEG XL test payload from the libjxl testdata contributors under CC BY 4.0. Its accompanying attribution records the original source and explains that the test adds a generated DNG wrapper; that fixture is not covered by the MPL and is not part of the installer.

HEIC / HEIF photographs

Heeler contains no HEVC decoder of its own. HEIC files are decoded by the operating system's own codec:

  • macOS: Apple's ImageIO framework, licensed by Apple as part of the operating system.
  • Windows: Windows Imaging Component, which decodes HEIC when Microsoft's HEVC Video Extensions and HEIF Image Extension are installed from the Microsoft Store. Without them Heeler reports HEIC files as unsupported; installing them is all that is needed, and nothing about Heeler changes.

On platforms whose operating system provides no HEVC codec, Heeler does not open HEIC files.