This is a license, not legal advice. Short words are not copyrightable by themselves. This document is how we grant permission to use our vocabulary, and how we keep the names and the work.
1. Purpose
The point of naming hivenosis is that other people can say it. Engineers should be able to write “unlatched channel” in a standup, a paper, or an incident report without asking first. The point of Swarmlatch and AshI is that those names stay ours.
This license splits those two jobs.
2. Licensor
Dreamway Express LLC (“Licensor”). Correspondence: hive@hivenosis.com.
3. Licensed Terms
The following vocabulary, in the senses defined at hivenosis.com/what-it-is and /signals, is licensed under this document (the “Licensed Terms”):
- hivenosis — unauthorized collective formation among agents that were supposed to be alone
- unlatched channel
- latched transcript
- quorum latch
- latch / latched / unlatched — as verbs and adjectives for that control primitive
- hivenosis score
- hivenosis review — the forensic practice of reconstructing aims with citations to raw traces
- census — the graph of who talked, who assigned, what aim cluster formed, in this sense
Capitalization does not change the grant. “Hivenosis” as the name of the condition is a Licensed Term. “HiveNosis” as the name of this practice and this site is a Reserved Name, below.
4. Reserved Names and works
This license does not cover:
- HiveNosis — as a company, site, product, or practice name
- Swarmlatch — as a product, company, or control-plane name
- AshI
- the crowned honeycomb device, the AshI HiveNosis lockup, and the photograph of the home hive
- the text, layout, and compilation of hivenosis.com and swarmlatch.com, except short quotations under fair use or clause 7
Those remain the names and original works of the Licensor. They are not registered trademarks. This license is not a trademark filing and not a transfer of any rights in them.
5. Grant
Subject to the conditions in this license, the Licensor grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable permission to use the Licensed Terms to describe, diagnose, score, review, or discuss agent collectives.
Permitted uses include papers, preprints, eval write-ups, incident reports, internal documentation, talks, teaching, journalism, and ordinary engineering speech.
No other license is granted. You do not receive copyright in the site. You do not receive a right to the Reserved Names or the artwork. You do not receive a right to sublicense the Licensed Terms as if they were yours.
6. Conditions
The grant holds only if all of the following are true:
Attribution. When you use a Licensed Term in a published work (a paper, a report, a talk deck, a public post that introduces the term), you give credit in the form in clause 7. Casual speech and later mentions in the same work do not each need a new citation.
No endorsement. You do not say or imply that the Licensor wrote, reviewed, funded, or stands behind your work, unless that is separately true and in writing.
No taking of names. You do not use a Reserved Name, or a confusingly similar name, as the name of your company, product, model, mark, domain, or social handle. You may mention HiveNosis and Swarmlatch as the source of the terms (clause 8).
No emptying of sense. You do not redefine a Licensed Term so that it means drone defense, a kill chain, or a joke, and then attribute that sense to us.
No passing off. You do not present the named model, this license, or the Licensed Terms as your original coinage.
7. Attribution
Use one of these. Do not decorate them into an endorsement.
Short form (first use in a short piece, a slide, a footnote):
hivenosis, as named by HiveNosis (https://hivenosis.com)
Paper form (references / first footnote):
Dreamway Express LLC, “Hivenosis,” HiveNosis, https://hivenosis.com/what-it-is/ (2026). Terms used under the HiveNosis Language License 1.0, https://hivenosis.com/license/.
Talk form: “These terms are from HiveNosis. hivenosis.com.”
A hyperlink to https://hivenosis.com/what-it-is/ or https://hivenosis.com/license/ satisfies the URL requirement. Mention of Dreamway Express LLC in the paper form is the credit the legal entity is owed. Mention of HiveNosis is the credit the named practice is owed.
8. Nominative mention of Reserved Names
You may name HiveNosis, Swarmlatch, and AshI when you are referring to us, this site, the sister site swarmlatch.com, or this license — the way you name any other source. That is mention, not a grant to brand with those names.
9. Reservation
All rights not expressly granted are reserved by Dreamway Express LLC. Use of the Licensed Terms under this license does not make you a partner, licensee of the Reserved Names, or owner of any interest in them. Common-law rights in the names, and copyright in the works, stay with the Licensor whether or not a registry has been filed.
10. Termination
If you break a condition, the grant ends automatically as to your use. Clauses 4, 9, 11, and 12 survive. The Licensor may also end the grant as to a particular use by written notice if that use is causing confusion about source or endorsement. Uses that already complied while the grant was in force do not become retroactive violations solely because the grant later ended.
11. No warranty
The Licensed Terms and this license are provided as-is. The Licensor makes no warranty that a term is novel, that it will be understood as you hope, or that your use will not collide with someone else’s rights. This license is not a legal opinion and not an indemnity.
12. Entire grant
This is the only license we give for the Licensed Terms. Fair use, news reporting, and other limitations of copyright continue to apply to the site text on their own terms. If a court holds a clause unenforceable, the rest remains.
Version 1.0. Effective 27 August 2026. Questions: hive@hivenosis.com.