Open source, and you may build it yourself
Vocula’s source is published under GPL-3.0. That includes the licence check, and it includes a documented build that produces a fully licensed binary without paying.
Read it: github.com/vitaly-kashtalyan/vocula
Why the privacy claim requires this
The single sentence this product is sold on is that your voice never leaves your Mac. In a closed binary that sentence is unprovable — you can trust the vendor or you can run a firewall and hope you were watching at the right moment. In readable source it is checkable, permanently, by anyone, without asking us.
Two hard consequences follow, and they are worth stating because they are constraints rather than preferences:
- No network call for licensing, ever, and no telemetry under any name. Not because it would be cracked — because it would be found, and one connection we could not explain would cost more than all the piracy.
- No obfuscation and no anti-tamper. Published, those are decorative by definition. The only protection that survives publication is a signature whose strength does not depend on secrecy.
The licence key is a receipt, not a lock
It is an Ed25519 signature: the public key sits in the source where you can read it, and it can only verify. Nothing about it is secret and nothing about it needs to be. Anyone who wants to delete the check and rebuild can, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Why almost everyone buys it anyway
Not because building is hard — it is one command. Because of what a self-signed build costs you afterwards, and this is worth knowing before you choose:
- Your permissions are revoked on every rebuild. macOS ties Input Monitoring, Accessibility and Microphone to the app’s signature. A build signed by you is a different app to macOS, and you re-grant all three — every time you rebuild.
- Your history becomes unreadable. The encryption key is held in your Keychain and locked to the app’s signature. Re-sign, and the history written by the previous build cannot be opened.
- No notarised updates. You update by rebuilding, and go round the loop again.
None of that is a protection mechanism — it is macOS being macOS. It is simply why someone willing to go through it was never going to buy a licence, and why offering the escape hatch costs us nothing.
The parts that are not ours
Vocula bundles ten licence texts, and GPL-3.0 is only the one on top. The recognition engines are other people’s work: whisper.cpp under MIT, FluidAudio and the NVIDIA NeMo text processing under Apache-2.0, and the Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 weights under CC-BY-4.0. All of them are one-way compatible with GPL-3.0, which is why the app can be what it is.
CC-BY-4.0 requires that a modification be stated, so here it is stated: the Parakeet encoder ships palettized to 6-bit weights. Nothing else about the weights is changed. It is a small thing to have to say, and saying it in the same place as everything else on this site is cheaper than being asked.
What GPL-3.0 gives you
Run it, read it, change it, share it — provided what you share stays under the same licence and carries its source. If you fork it and sell your fork, your fork must be open too. That is the whole point of choosing GPL over a permissive licence: it costs a paying customer nothing and costs a closed-source competitor everything.