Licence
MIT, both halves, no strings.
The IDE and the language server are both MIT licensed. Use it, fork it, ship it in something commercial — the licence text is the whole of the deal.
There is no contributor licence agreement. Contributions are inbound = outbound: you keep your copyright, and you licence your contribution under the same MIT terms as the rest of the project. Nothing to sign, no bot to argue with.
MIT License Copyright (c) 2024 Bartosz Korczyński Copyright (c) 2026 The HexIDE Authors 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.
Attribution
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
This is not politeness. The load-bearing ones, including two that carry obligations travelling with any binary you redistribute — the complete set is in the notices file.
- Avalonia UI
- The cross-platform UI framework the whole interface is built on, with AvaloniaEdit for the code editor and a vendored slice of Avalonia.Labs (the routed-command manager). MIT.
- Dock
- The docking layout system, © Wiesław Šoltés. MIT.
- AvaloniaVisualBasic6
- © Bartosz Korczyński. HexIDE began as a fork of this project, and its copyright travels in our LICENSE. MIT.
- EmmyLua.LanguageServer.Framework
- © CppCXY. The JSON-RPC and LSP protocol shell the VB6 language server is built on. MIT.
- proleap VB6 grammar
- © Ulrich Wolffgang, by way of grammars-v4. Both the interpreter and the language server parse with descendants of it. MIT.
- Fluent UI System Icons
- © Microsoft. Every icon in the interface is drawn from these as themed vector geometry. MIT.
- Serilog
- Logging — the core package plus its file sink and logging extensions. Apache-2.0: the licence text must accompany binary redistribution.
- ANTLR runtime
- Parser runtime. BSD-3-Clause.
The authoritative and complete list is THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md in the repository. If anything here and that disagree, that wins.
Trademarks
Whose names these are.
“Visual Basic”, “VB”, and “VBA” are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. HexIDE is an independent, community-built project — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft — and uses these names only descriptively to indicate VB6 file-format and workflow compatibility.
No VB6 artwork, iconography or fonts are redistributed: the VB6-extracted icon set and MS Sans Serif were removed from the tree. The interface is drawn entirely from openly licensed vector geometry — Microsoft's MIT-licensed Fluent UI System Icons, credited above — and it bundles no fonts at all, so it renders in whatever your system uses.
Privacy and security
What leaves your machine.
The core IDE does not phone home, collect telemetry, or transmit your projects anywhere — it reads and writes local files only.
The bundled AI Chat add-in is the exception, and it should be obvious rather than buried here: it sends the code you show it to whichever API endpoint you configure, using your key. It does nothing at all until you set one up.
Nothing distributed here is code-signed or notarised, and the download page says so plainly for both Windows and macOS.
Please report vulnerabilities privately rather than in a public issue: open a draft security advisory.