Skip to content

Persona: clarify licensing of the Rive animation assets (and possibility of editable sources) #471

Description

@possibilities

The Persona component hotlinks six compiled Rive files from Vercel Blob storage (packages/elements/src/persona.tsx): command-2.0.riv, glint-2.0.riv, halo-2.0.riv, mana-2.0.riv, obsidian-2.0.riv, and orb-1.2.riv (the opal variant).

The repo is Apache-2.0, but these binaries are not in the repo, the packages, or the shadcn registry payload — they are fetched at runtime — so no license text appears to cover the animation assets themselves.

From public sources, the animations originate from Surge Studio's "Elements" product line, which its creator announced was acquired by Vercel in January 2026 (announcement, elements.surge.studio). The pre-acquisition license at https://elements.surge.studio/legal/license is still the only license text publicly associated with these files, and it states copyright is owned by Surge Studio and prohibits redistribution — presumably superseded by the acquisition, but nothing published says so.

Two questions:

  1. What license applies to the .riv assets now? In particular: may users self-host the files (useful for offline, air-gapped, or e2e-tested apps rather than depending on the blob store), and may they modify them?
  2. Is there a path to the editable Rive sources? The original Gumroad packages included "a .rev source file for customisation in Rive", so editable sources exist. Publishing them (or offering a way to request them, or even just documenting the state-machine contract) would let users build compatible custom personas — e.g. adding a new state beyond listening/thinking/speaking/asleep.

Happy to help document the outcome (e.g. an asset-license note in the README or the persona docs).

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions