Copyright, licences and attributions

This page explains, in plain language, who owns what when you use flowss: the work you create, the software and libraries flowss supplies, the open-source projects and icon sets it is built on, and the names and marks that appear in the product. It also tells you the two things the licences ask of you in practice — crediting Font Awesome when you publish its icons, and checking the licence of any icon you take from the online catalogue — and how to raise a question about attribution or copyright. The binding texts are the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy; where this page and those differ, they win. This page is not legal advice.

At a glance

The copyright notice

In short: © 2026 flowss. All rights reserved. The notice as it actually appears at the foot of every documentation page and of the website is the full form, which names the company that holds the copyright:

© 2026 Voranox Inc. flowss — Flow Systems Studio. All rights reserved.

The three names in it are three different kinds of fact:

The documentation footer also states that "This documentation, its text and its examples are protected by copyright." and that "Engine and format names are trademarks of their respective owners", with links to the terms and this page. All rights are reserved, so if you want to reproduce documentation text or examples, ask first at hello@flowss.ai.

The website footer carries the same full notice. Its year is the current year, while the documentation's notice is fixed at 2026, the year this edition of the documentation was published.

What belongs to you

Everything you create

Section 4 of the terms is short and direct: you retain ownership of everything you create with flowss. The terms do not list types of work; "everything you create" includes, for example, your diagram source, boards, figures and the files you export.

The same section limits what flowss does with your content. flowss does not train models on your diagrams. It processes your input only to render diagrams, generate previews and, when you ask, call AI providers to assist you. The Privacy Policy adds that flowss does not sell or rent your data and does not read your cloud-synced diagrams except to render them back to you.

Work the AI helps you make

The terms make no separate rule for diagrams, text or figures the AI helps you produce: section 4 covers everything you create with flowss. Two practical points go with that:

• Check AI output before you rely on it. Section 9 of the terms says AI features can make mistakes and that you should check generated diagrams before using them in research, regulatory or commercial contexts.
• The provider sees the request. When you use an AI feature, your prompt and the relevant diagram context go to the AI provider handling that request — on the hosted allowance Anthropic or OpenAI, or the provider whose key you brought — and that provider's own privacy policy applies to that leg of the call. See AI in flowss.

Whether material produced with AI assistance can itself be protected by copyright is a question for the law where you live, not something flowss can settle for you.

Material you bring in

You are responsible for having the right to use what you put into flowss: pictures you paste, PDFs you upload, data you import, code you bind, papers you add to an Evidence review. The acceptable-use rules in section 7 of the terms ask you not to use flowss to infringe copyright, and section 14 asks you to cover the reasonable cost if a claim is brought against flowss because of content you put in.

Material you pull in from outside keeps its own owners and terms. Examples in the product include:

Cite these sources in your publications as your field expects.

Feedback you send

If you send flowss feedback or a feature idea, section 5 of the terms says flowss may act on it without owing you anything for it. That is a claim on the suggestion only, never on anything you have made.

Sharing and leaving

• A share link carries the document inside the address. flowss does not host the shared copy, but anyone holding the link holds the document, so treat it as public once sent. See Sharing and permissions.
• Projects and teams use invitations at a role you choose, and they can be withdrawn.
• Your work goes with you. Every studio exports its own work, and Download my data on your account page downloads everything the account database holds about you as one file. See Account settings and your data.

What belongs to flowss

Section 5 of the terms lists what the service itself consists of — the software, the rendering engines, the template catalogue, the icon and figure libraries, the name and the marks — and says it belongs to Voranox Inc. or to its licensors. The terms give you permission to use these, not ownership of them.

Using templates, icons and figures

If you want to redistribute supplied material in bulk beyond your own diagrams — for example a large set of templates or a sample dataset — ask first at hello@flowss.ai.

Example content

Many templates and starters ship with realistic example content so you can see a finished figure straight away. flowss marks it so it cannot be mistaken for real results:

• The Figure studio's sample datasets and the Lab's reporting-guideline starters are marked "Example data — not real", and exports of figures that still use them carry an "EXAMPLE DATA" stamp until you replace the data.
• In the Lab, the starter's notice line ("EXAMPLE text from a fictional …") is the record. Deleting that line, once you have replaced the values with your own, removes the mark.

See Exporting your work and Lab views and renderers.

Study courses in the Exchange

Study's Exchange (in the Library group of Study's navigation) is "The content library — inspect provenance and fork any course into an editable copy that keeps its attribution." Each built-in course there carries a CC BY 4.0 label. Fork makes an editable copy in your courses, titled with "(fork)" after the original name, and flowss confirms "Forked into your courses — attribution and source lineage were preserved." The fork appears under Your forks with its attribution line, which reads "Forked from “…” · CC BY 4.0" naming the original course. Keep that attribution with the course if you reuse its material. The Exchange is local to your Study workspace: there is no marketplace or payment in it.

Reporting-guideline checklists

The Lab checks documents against published reporting guidelines such as CONSORT and PRISMA, and Science recommends the guideline that governs a figure and lists the items it asks of that figure. The published checklists are the work of their authors. In flowss each item's requirement is a faithful paraphrase rather than a quotation of the published wording, while the item number, section and title follow the published checklist so you can read the two side by side. When a journal asks for a completed checklist, use the official one. See Reporting standards.

Cloud architecture icons

The marks in the cloud architecture engine are original schematic drawings made for flowss. They deliberately do not reproduce AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or CNCF icon artwork, which is trademarked and licensed by those organisations. Each mark shows what kind of resource it is — a queue, a database, a function — rather than a provider's logo.

Icon packs and their licences

The built-in icon library bundles eight open icon sets — 34,766 icons in total, plus 7,514 alternative names — distributed through Iconify's packages. They are part of flowss itself, so they work offline. Each set keeps its own upstream licence.

The counts per set are 7,638 (Material Design Icons), 6,194 (Tabler), 9,161 (Phosphor), 2,691 (Health Icons), 3,229 (Remix), 2,672 (Carbon), 1,774 (Lucide) and 1,407 (Font Awesome 6 Solid). Font Awesome 6 Solid is the one bundled set whose licence asks for a credit wherever its icons are used. flowss carries the notices for the MIT, Apache-2.0 and ISC sets itself, in its own notices file, so using those icons in your diagrams needs no credit from you.

Font Awesome: the one set that needs a credit

Font Awesome Free is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, which asks for a credit wherever its icons are used. If anything you publish or share contains a Font Awesome icon, credit Font Awesome alongside it. flowss uses this wording, and you can copy it:

Icons: Font Awesome Free by Fonticons, Inc. (https://fontawesome.com), licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

flowss helps in these places:

Other export paths do not check for Font Awesome icons — for example a PNG or PDF exported from the Studio, or a Science figure. If you used a Font Awesome icon there, add the credit yourself, for example in the figure's caption or your acknowledgements. Font Awesome sets found through the online search (such as Regular or Brands) carry the same obligation, and the Studio icon library and Weave detect them too.

Online icons

The icon library's online tier searches the open Iconify catalogue of more than 200,000 icons across hundreds of collections. These icons are not part of flowss: they are fetched when you use them, through flowss's own servers, and every collection keeps its own upstream licence. Some need no credit, some require attribution, and some depict other companies' logos, which are their trademarks.

Before you publish an online icon:

1. Hover the icon's tile in the results. Its tooltip shows the icon's id, the collection's name and, when the catalogue states one, the collection's licence.
2. Check what that licence asks of you.
3. Add any credit it requires next to your figure.

flowss does part of this for you. When you copy or insert an online icon from a collection under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (such as Game Icons, CC BY 3.0, or Codicons, CC BY 4.0), the icon's SVG carries the credit in its description: the collection, its author when known, and the licence with a link to its deed. Its tile shows a BY badge, and the line under the preview says a credit is required. Weave's SVG export writes the same credits into the file's description ("It uses icons licensed Creative Commons Attribution: credit their authors wherever you publish it — the credit is written into the file's description."), and its PNG export tells you a credit is owed. A credit inside a file is invisible on the page, so still add a visible one where you publish.

Collections under a NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC) are not offered at all: flowss's relay leaves them out of the results and refuses their drawings, because flowss is a commercial product and a credit does not make commercial use allowed. A collection whose licence cannot be established is left out the same way.

See The icon library.

Fonts

flowss bundles its fonts and serves them from its own site, so no request goes to a font service while you work. The four interface fonts are distributed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows you to use them in the documents and images you create, including commercially. Caveat is an open font taken from Google Fonts.

The four interface fonts are copies of the official Google Fonts sources, with each family's SIL Open Font License file kept beside it. Caveat's two files (Latin and Latin Extended) are served from the same site, and your browser only fetches them when a page actually draws text in that face.

The open-source projects flowss is built on

flowss is built on dozens of open-source projects: diagram engines; canvas, layout and document libraries; the on-device voice; editor and UI components; and the icon library. Their licence notices are available on request at hello@flowss.ai. The licences named below are the ones each package declares at the version flowss uses.

Diagram engines that run in your browser

Canvases, layout and documents

BPMN

Editor and framework

Server-side rendering and service libraries

The on-device voice

Note: Study's read-aloud voice is currently switched off. These packages remain listed because they are part of flowss's code, but today no voice model is downloaded, no speech is played, and Hugging Face receives no request from flowss. The notes below describe how the voice works if it returns.

Engines flowss sends your source to, rather than ships

Some engines are not part of flowss at all. flowss sends your diagram source to an outside service, which returns the picture. No code from these engines is bundled or distributed by flowss.

Because the source leaves your browser for these engines, the Studio tells you beside them: "Drawn by Kroki, a third-party render service: this source is sent to it." or "Drawn by a PlantUML server (the public plantuml.com unless self-hosted): this source is sent to it." Choose an engine that draws in your browser for confidential material. See Choosing an engine.

Services flowss runs on

Running flowss means handing parts of the job to other companies: a payment processor, a database and authentication host, and the AI providers that do the model work. Section 10 of the terms says flowss chooses them and remains answerable to you for the service, but their own terms govern their own systems. The Privacy Policy names who receives what.

Conditions that travel with your work

Two licences attach conditions beyond a notice file. One is flowss's to keep; the other is yours when you publish.

Licensing what you publish

flowss does not choose a licence for your work. When you build a submission bundle in the Lab, the bundle carries no licence unless one is supplied, and the bundle says so: "No licence was chosen, so this bundle has no LICENSE.txt and a reader has no stated permission to reuse it." If you want others to reuse your figure or data, add a licence of your choice (for example a Creative Commons licence) to the archive or your repository before you share it. See Publishing, provenance and compliance in Lab.

The terms, section by section

The Terms of Service were last updated on August 21, 2026. This table points you to the section that answers each question; the terms themselves are the binding text.

Trademarks

• flowss and Flow Systems Studio are the names and marks of the product. Section 5 of the terms says the name and the marks belong to Voranox Inc. or its licensors.
• Engine and format names are trademarks of their respective owners. flowss uses them nominatively — to say which syntax a figure is written in and which service drew it — and no endorsement by, or affiliation with, their owners is implied.
• "Mermaid" is a trademark of Mermaid Chart Inc.
• "PlantUML" is a trademark of Arnaud Roques.
• "Font Awesome" is a trademark of Fonticons, Inc.
• "Kroki" names the rendering service at kroki.io that the proxied engines are sent to, rather than a library flowss ships.
• Cloud provider marks do not appear in the cloud architecture engine; its marks are original drawings (see Cloud architecture icons).
• Brand logos found through the online icon search remain the trademarks of the companies they depict.

Publishing work made with flowss

A short checklist before a diagram or figure leaves flowss for a paper, a slide deck, a website or a client:

1. Ownership. The work is yours under section 4 of the terms. The terms do not require you to credit flowss, and exports on every plan carry no flowss branding.
2. Example data. If an export carries "EXAMPLE DATA", it still contains sample content shipped with the platform. Replace it with your own before publishing.
3. Font Awesome. If the figure uses Font Awesome icons, include the credit.
4. Online icons. Check the licence of each online icon's collection and add any credit it requires.
5. Outside material. Cite structures, papers and data you pulled in from outside sources.
6. AI assistance. Check AI-generated content for errors, and follow any disclosure rule your publisher or client applies.
7. Your own licence. If you want others to reuse the work, attach the licence you choose.

Reporting an attribution or copyright concern

If you are a rights holder and believe an attribution in flowss is missing or wrong, or that something in flowss uses your work without permission, write to hello@flowss.ai — the same address the terms give for questions about them, and the one the contact page shows. The contact page's cards open an email with a subject already set, but none is dedicated to legal questions, so writing to the address directly is simplest. Include the page or feature concerned, what you believe is wrong, and how to reach you.

Section 7 of the terms forbids using flowss to infringe copyright, and flowss may suspend accounts that break these rules.

Tips

• Keep the Font Awesome credit line somewhere you can paste it from, such as your paper's acknowledgements template.
• Prefer the built-in icon sets when you need icons with no attribution duty: seven of the eight need no credit.
• Hover an online icon before inserting it: its collection and licence are in the tooltip.
• Use SVG export from Weave when a board contains Font Awesome icons, so the credit travels inside the file.
• For confidential work, pick an engine that draws in your browser rather than one sent to PlantUML or Kroki.
• Export regularly. An exported file is the copy of your work that depends on nothing else.

Limits and known constraints

• Automatic credits for Font Awesome and other Creative Commons Attribution icons exist only in the Studio icon library's Insert into editor and Copy SVG, and in Weave's SVG and PNG exports. Other export paths, including Science figure exports, do not detect them.
• The licence shown for an online icon is whatever the Iconify catalogue states for its collection; when the catalogue states none, nothing is shown, and you need to check the collection's source yourself.
• Lab submission bundles carry no licence, author list or caption when built from the Lab.
• The terms are not reviewed legal advice for your situation, and this page summarises them; the terms are the binding text.
• Material fetched from outside services (protein structures, abstracts, sample datasets) is subject to those sources' terms, which flowss cannot change.

Troubleshooting

For anything else, see Troubleshooting and FAQ.

Related pages

• Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
• Privacy and your data
• Security at flowss
• The icon library
• Exporting your work
• Choosing an engine
• Reporting standards
• Publishing, provenance and compliance in Lab
• Troubleshooting and FAQ