A short explanation, since it comes up.
The market for software that helps you write got expensive somewhere along the way. A word processor with a subscription. An outlining tool with three pricing tiers. A cloud-sync fee for a feature that used to just be called "saving a file." None of that is illegal, and some of it is even reasonable — people who build software need to eat.
But none of it is necessary, either. Creative writing already has enough real barriers — time, doubt, the blank page itself — without a monthly bill stacked on top of them.
Free-as-in-price solves the money problem. It doesn't solve the trust problem or the permanence problem, and those two matter more.
Trust — a manuscript is personal, sometimes for years before anyone else reads a word of it. Qenna Writer never asks for an account, never phones home, never uploads anything anywhere. That's not a claim you have to take on faith: the code that proves it is sitting in the open, not behind an NDA.
Permanence — closed software can vanish. A company gets acquired, a product gets sunset, a beloved feature gets ripped out and resold as a subscription tier a year later. None of that can happen here by construction. The Qenna Writer License — based on GPLv3, plus a condition that any redistribution stays credited and free of charge, see below — means this exact version, warts and all, can always be rebuilt by anyone, forever, even if I stop maintaining it tomorrow. That's not a courtesy. It's the whole point of choosing terms that rule out someone forking it into a closed, or a paid, product down the line.
This isn't charity, and I'd rather not dress it up as some. I built Qenna Writer because I wanted to write my own books in it, and giving it away costs me nothing I wasn't already spending — it's evenings and weekends either way, one person, no venture funding, no roadmap dictated by a pricing tier.
What I ask in return isn't money. It's the same line that's been on the About screen since the beginning: write good stories. That's the whole deal.
Yes, but with conditions.
Part of the point of Qenna Writer is the democratization of creative writing — anyone should be able to use it to write their own work. So redistributing the code comes with two natural conditions: first, Qenna Writer and its creator (P.H. Lobato) have to be credited in any distribution. And more importantly, any redistribution, modification, or other software built from Qenna Writer's open code has to remain just as free and open.
That second condition isn't optional. It's the legitimate guarantee that Qenna Writer, and anything that comes from it, keeps its core philosophy alive: the democratization of, and free access to, creative writing. Anyone can write freely in Qenna Writer, and in any future distribution of it, without paying a cent for it. That's the whole point of this project — the freedom to write.