Evidently their intention is that if you write a program with Ellie and save it it is in the public domain. According to my correspondent, they may switch to releasing edited code with the MIT license.

I let him know that those terms would make me very reluctant to use Ellie for anything, even open source code, since the ability to apply an open source license requires that I have a copyright. I suggested that they putting a very visible statement of what they're doing on the page.