Licensing & Intellectual Property Policy for the VDD Methodology

Version 1.0 · Last updated: 14 October 2026

The Verification-Driven Delivery (VDD) Methodology was created by Alexander Lipanov, who is and remains its author. All economic rights in the VDD Materials, and the names and logos in Section 9, are owned by Sofycod Sp. z o.o., Warsaw, Poland (“Sofycod”), which administers, maintains, and enforces them as the sole steward of the methodology.

Sofycod alone determines the official VDD specification, how it is versioned, and what is described as official VDD. No other person or organization may present itself as the maintainer, steward, certifier, or governing body of VDD.

"VDD Materials" means the VDD specification, the VDD Implementation Playbook, the onboarding presentation, the spreadsheet templates, diagrams, articles, and other documents and website text published at vdd-methodology.org, in any version.

It does not cover software tools (Section 10), the names and logos (Section 9), third-party material, or content marked otherwise.

Unless otherwise indicated, the VDD Materials are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full legal code is at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode.

In plain terms: you may copy and redistribute the VDD Materials, unchanged, in any medium or format, for non-commercial purposes, provided you give credit (Section 7). You may not distribute modified versions. Use inside your own organization is covered separately and generously in Section 4, and commercial use by others is covered in Section 5.

On top of CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Sofycod grants every person and organization a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive permission to do the following, for any business purpose, including purposes that bring commercial benefit to your organization. "Your organization" means the legal entity you act for, its affiliates, and the employees and contractors who work for them.

4.1. Apply the VDD methodology in your own organization, including to estimate, price, verify and deliver software, including software you deliver to your own clients or customers. You may use Brick counts, prices and forecasts in your proposals, contracts and reports, and explain to the client how they were produced.

4.2. Copy the VDD Materials for internal use and share them with your employees, contractors, auditors and professional advisers.

4.3. Train your own people on VDD.

4.4. Adapt the VDD Materials for your own internal use: add, remove, rename or change Brick categories, complexity modifiers, rates, forms, templates and procedures, translate them, and annotate them. Calibrating VDD to your own data is not a modification of the methodology: it is how VDD is meant to be used.

4.5. Show clients the parts of the VDD Materials, or of your internal adaptation, that explain how a specific estimate, price or forecast was produced, with credit, for that engagement and not for general publication.

No fee, royalty, registration or notification is required for any of this. This permission does not depend on your industry or size, or on whether you compete with Sofycod.

The following activities, when offered to third parties for a fee or as part of a commercial offering, are "Commercial VDD Activities":

• training, courses, workshops, certification or accreditation about VDD;

• consulting, coaching, implementation, assessment or audit services about VDD, or marketed as based on VDD;

• software products or services marketed as implementing, supporting or based on VDD;

• selling, licensing, paywalling or bundling the VDD Materials, or any adapted version of them, in a paid product or service;

• publishing translations or adapted versions of the VDD Materials (see also Section 12).

Commercial VDD Activities require a prior written agreement with Sofycod ("Commercial Agreement"). The Commercial Agreement sets the terms, including the royalty or revenue share that the partner pays to Sofycod, any use of the names and logos, and quality requirements. We welcome partners who want to earn with VDD and share with us. A Commercial Agreement grants a non-exclusive, non-transferable license for the Commercial VDD Activities it names, for its term and territory. The partner must state its licensed status publicly, on its website and in its materials for those activities, in the form the Commercial Agreement sets. Sofycod may publish the list of current licensed partners on vdd-methodology.org, and confirms on request whether a specific offer is licensed.

Commercial VDD Activities do not include applying VDD to deliver your own software work, including to your own clients, or training your own people. Those stay free under Section 4.

You may not:

• present the VDD Materials, or any part of the VDD methodology, as your own work, or remove or obscure the credit and notices on them;

• publish or distribute to the public, or to third parties outside your organization (except as allowed in Section 4.5), modified, adapted, abridged or translated versions of the VDD Materials, including under names such as "version", "edition", "fork", "profile" or "extension" of VDD;

• carry out Commercial VDD Activities without a Commercial Agreement;

• use the names and logos in Section 9 in ways that Section 9 does not allow;

• claim to be the steward, maintainer, certifier or official body of VDD, or issue VDD certificates, audit reports or "official" or "certified" designations.

If you breach this policy, your permissions under Section 4 end, and Sofycod may require you to stop the infringing activity and claim the remedies the law provides. The permissions are reinstated if you remedy the breach within 30 days of becoming aware of it or of being notified, the same cure period as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

When you share or quote the VDD Materials outside your organization, give credit in this form:

Verification-Driven Delivery (VDD) Methodology by Alexander Lipanov, © 2026 Sofycod Sp. z o.o., vdd-methodology.org. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

No credit is required for internal use, or for the Brick counts, prices, and forecasts you give your clients. Short quotations with credit are welcome, and your legal rights to quote are not affected by this policy.

You may say that your organization applies, or is based on, the VDD methodology, and you may use terms such as Delivery Brick, Delivery Unit, Base Unit Rate, and Weighted Bricks to describe your own use. If you have adapted VDD internally, say "adapted from VDD" and do not call your adapted version VDD.

You may not suggest endorsement, sponsorship, partnership, or certification by the author or Sofycod without prior written consent.

"VDD", "VDD Methodology", "Verification-Driven Delivery", "SOFYCOD" and the associated logos and icons are the property of Sofycod Sp. z o.o. and are protected as trademarks to the extent permitted by law.

You may refer to them factually, as in Section 8. You may not use them in the name of your own framework, methodology, product, service, company, domain name or social media handle, or in any way that suggests that what you offer is official or endorsed, without prior written consent. A Commercial Agreement may allow a designation such as "VDD Licensed Partner".

Software tools are not covered by this policy. Any tool published by Sofycod will carry its own license, stated at the time of its release. No open-source license, including MIT, currently applies to any VDD-related software, and none should be assumed.

The spreadsheet templates are VDD Materials: Sections 3 and 4 apply to them, and you may adapt them for your internal use.

Everything you create by applying VDD in your organization, including Brick counts, rates, calibration data, estimates, specifications, and code, belongs to you. Sofycod claims no rights to it and receives no data from you because you use VDD.

A translation or other adapted version of the VDD Materials may be published or distributed only with the prior written consent of Sofycod, which may be subject to conditions. A translation made with consent must:

• carry the credit in Section 7, the original title and the version of the VDD Materials it translates;

• state that it is a translation of the official VDD Materials, made with the consent of Sofycod; and

• meet any other terms stated in the consent.

You may translate the VDD Materials for your own internal use under Section 4.4.

We want VDD to be available in many languages. Write to us.

This policy protects the text of the VDD Materials, the names and logos, and the agreements we sign with partners. Copyright does not protect ideas or methods, so an independent person may develop their own methodology on similar underlying ideas without copying our text or using our names. This policy does not try to prevent that.

The VDD Materials are provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. Estimates, prices and forecasts produced with VDD are your responsibility, and nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice. To the extent permitted by law, the author and Sofycod are not liable for damages arising from the use of the VDD Materials. Nothing in this section limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

This is version 1.0. New versions of the VDD Materials may be published with new versions of this policy. Material you have received under a version of this policy stays available to you under the terms of that version.

This policy, including the additional permission in Section 4, is governed by the laws of Poland, subject to mandatory provisions of law.

Questions, translations, Commercial Agreements, and partnerships:

Legal entity: Sofycod Sp. z o.o., Hoża str, Nr 86, Lok. 210, Warsaw, 00-682, Poland. REGON 543497780, NIP 7011291045

Inquiries: Contact Us

Author: Alexander Lipanov, www.alexlipanov.com

Corporate website: https://sofycod.com