/ legal

Terms of Use

Effective June 11, 2026 · Replaces all prior versions

These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the parallelogram.dev website (the "Site") and the open-source parallelogram command-line interface (the "CLI" or "Software"). By accessing the Site or using the CLI, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Site or the CLI.

References to "Parallelogram", "we", "us", and "our" mean the individual author and maintainer, Thatayotlhe Tsenang, operating the project at parallelogram.dev. References to "you" and "your" mean the individual or entity accessing the Site or using the CLI.

1. The open-source software license

The CLI is free and open-source software. Your rights to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sublicense the CLI are governed exclusively by the Apache License, Version 2.0 ("Apache License"), the full text of which is available at github.com/Thatayotlhe04/Parallelogram/blob/main/LICENSE and at apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

These Terms of Use do not expand, restrict, or supersede the Apache License with respect to the Software itself. They exist alongside it to address the website, the warranty disclaimer as it applies to our specific claims, liability limitations, and acceptable use of the Site. In the event of any conflict between these Terms and the Apache License as applied to the Software, the Apache License controls for matters governed by that license.

The Apache License grants you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use, reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the CLI and derivative works, subject to the conditions in the license (principally: preserve copyright notices, include a copy of the license, and state any material changes you make). There is no tiering, no usage cap, and no registration requirement for use of the CLI under the Apache License.

2. Use of the website

2.1 Permitted use

You may access parallelogram.dev for any lawful purpose: to learn about the CLI, to read documentation, to follow links to the GitHub repository, or to read these legal pages. The Site is provided free of charge, without registration.

2.2 Prohibited conduct

You may not use the Site in any way that:

• Violates any applicable local, national, or international law or regulation.
• Attempts to gain unauthorized access to, interfere with, disrupt, or damage the Site or its hosting infrastructure.
• Introduces viruses, malware, ransomware, logic bombs, or any other harmful code.
• Performs automated scraping at a rate that creates unreasonable load on the hosting infrastructure. (The Site is a static page; it can be fetched at normal browsing frequency without issue.)
• Uses the Site as an origin or amplifier for denial-of-service attacks.
• Impersonates Parallelogram, its maintainer, or any other person or entity.
• Attempts to harvest personal data from the Site (there is none to harvest, but attempting it is still prohibited).

2.3 Availability

We make reasonable efforts to keep the Site available, but we make no uptime guarantees and reserve the right to take the Site down for maintenance, updates, or any other reason without notice. The CLI, once installed, is independent of the Site and will continue to function regardless of Site availability.

3. Intellectual property

3.1 The CLI source code

The source code of the CLI is licensed under the Apache License as described in Section 1. The copyright in the original code is held by Thatayotlhe Tsenang and contributors. Nothing in these Terms transfers ownership of that copyright to you; you receive only the rights granted by the Apache License.

3.2 The website content

All text, graphics, layout, and other content on parallelogram.dev that is not part of the open-source CLI codebase is owned by Thatayotlhe Tsenang. You may not reproduce, republish, or redistribute the Site's marketing content without prior written permission, except as necessary for normal personal use (e.g., sharing a link to the page, taking a screenshot for a review, quoting a short passage with attribution).

3.3 Third-party trademarks

The names, logos, and marks of third-party projects mentioned on this Site — including but not limited to Axolotl, Unsloth, TRL, Hugging Face, OpenAI, and GitHub Actions — are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Their appearance on this Site is a factual statement of technical format compatibility and constitutes nominative fair use. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in partnership with any of these organizations or projects unless we explicitly state otherwise. If a trademark holder believes a particular use is improper and contacts us, we will review and address the concern promptly.

4. No warranty

THE SITE AND THE CLI ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. THIS DISCLAIMER IS IN ADDITION TO, AND NOT IN LIEU OF, THE NO-WARRANTY PROVISION IN THE APACHE LICENSE.

In plain language: we make every reasonable effort to ensure the validator is correct and that the rules it implements faithfully catch the failure modes they describe. But no software is perfect, and we cannot guarantee that:

• The CLI is free of bugs or defects.
• The CLI will catch every possible data quality problem in every possible dataset and framework combination.
• A dataset that passes all checks with exit code 0 will necessarily produce a successful training run.
• A model trained on parallelogram-validated data will perform as you hope or expect.
• The CLI is compatible with every version of Python, every operating system, or every package environment.
• The Site is free from errors, inaccuracies, or outdated information.

4.1 The exit-0 claim, specifically

The marketing statement on the home page — "if it exits 0, your run won't fail because of data" — is a specific and bounded claim. It means: if the CLI exits with code 0, none of the failure modes covered by the enabled rule set were detected in your file. It is not a warranty against all conceivable training failures, data quality issues, or framework-specific edge cases. Specifically:

• The claim applies to the six rule categories in v0.4.2: schema, roles, empty-content, context-window, duplicates, and encoding. Future rule additions will be noted in the changelog.
• The claim applies only when all rules are enabled. Using --disable to suppress one or more rules narrows the coverage. The CLI emits a prominent warning on stderr when any rule is disabled; heed it.
• The context-window rule depends on an accurate token count. By default, a character-based approximation is used. Passing a model-specific tokenizer with --tokenizer produces a more precise count. If you use the approximation, borderline records may not be flagged.
• The claim covers the data file as it exists at validation time. If you modify the file after validation and before training, the guarantee no longer applies.

5. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL THATAYOTLHE TSENANG OR ANY CONTRIBUTOR TO THE PARALLELOGRAM PROJECT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SITE OR THE CLI, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO:

• Lost, corrupted, or wasted training runs or model weights.
• Wasted compute time or cloud spend (GPU hours, TPU credits, API calls, or otherwise).
• Loss of revenue, profits, or business opportunities.
• Loss of data or dataset integrity.
• Costs of substitute services or re-running experiments.
• Any indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, punitive, or consequential damages of any kind.

THIS LIMITATION APPLIES REGARDLESS OF THE THEORY OF LIABILITY (CONTRACT, TORT, NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE) AND REGARDLESS OF WHETHER WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages. In those jurisdictions, our liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted by law. In any event, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims arising under these Terms shall not exceed USD $0 (zero), reflecting that the CLI and Site are provided entirely free of charge.

6. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Thatayotlhe Tsenang from and against any claims, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to: (a) your use of the Site or CLI in violation of these Terms; (b) your violation of any applicable law or regulation; or (c) your infringement of the intellectual property or other rights of any third party.

7. Third-party services and links

The Site contains links to third-party websites and services (GitHub, PyPI, Hugging Face, Vercel, and the websites of the projects listed in the Integrations section). These links are provided for convenience and informational purposes only. We have no control over those sites and are not responsible for their content, availability, privacy practices, or terms of service. A link from this Site does not constitute an endorsement.

Your use of any third-party site is governed by that site's own terms and privacy policy. We encourage you to read them.

8. Contributions

If you submit a contribution to the Parallelogram project (a pull request, issue, patch, or other code or documentation submission) via GitHub, you do so under the Apache License and the standard Apache contributor expectations. By submitting a contribution, you represent that:

• You have the legal right to submit it.
• Your contribution does not infringe any third party's intellectual property rights.
• You license your contribution under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

We do not require a formal Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for contributions, but by submitting a pull request you are implicitly granting the license rights described above.

9. Modifications to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. The updated Terms will be posted at this URL with a new effective date. We will not retroactively apply more restrictive Terms to past uses of the CLI. Material changes will be communicated via the GitHub repository (through a commit message, release note, or similar notice) in addition to updating this page.

Your continued use of the Site or CLI after the effective date of revised Terms constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms. If you do not agree to the updated Terms, you should stop using the Site. Your pre-existing rights under the Apache License for the CLI are not affected by any change to these Terms.

10. Governing law and dispute resolution

These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Republic of South Africa, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles.

If a dispute arises between you and us relating to these Terms or the use of the Site or CLI, we encourage you to first contact us directly at tsenangthatayotlhe04@gmail.com to attempt an informal resolution. We commit to responding to any dispute notice within 14 calendar days and to engaging in good-faith discussion before either party resorts to formal legal process.

If informal resolution fails, any dispute shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of South Africa. If you are accessing the Site from a jurisdiction where the laws require a different governing law to apply, those mandatory local provisions will govern to the extent they conflict with the above.

11. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable, that provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or severed if modification is not possible, and the remaining provisions will continue in full force and effect.

12. Entire agreement

These Terms, together with the Apache License (for matters covered by that license), constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Site and the CLI, and supersede all prior and contemporaneous understandings, communications, and agreements, whether written or oral, relating to that subject matter.

13. Contact

Questions or notices regarding these Terms should be directed to:

Thatayotlhe Tsenang
Email: tsenangthatayotlhe04@gmail.com
Jurisdiction: South Africa

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