Documentation
Practical guides, published methods and stable API contracts. Start with the overview or all guides and answers if you are new to the movement.
Adopt — for a maintainer
Section titled “Adopt — for a maintainer”- Adoption guide — prerequisites, the inbound-licence gate, the one file, notice preservation, the fork question, claiming, weight class, the badge.
- Leaving (quit) — the same act reversed, at the same depth: vesting consequences, what the registry shows afterwards, and why there is no penalty.
- PURPOSE.yml reference — the optional manifest, field by field, and
the rule that keeps it safe: informational mirrors only, the
LICENSEfile governs.
Contribute — for a contributor
Section titled “Contribute — for a contributor”- Contributors — the copyright position, the sign-off and its bounded delegation, Impact Shares, the materiality gate, the shadow-mode vote, certificates, and the list of things a contributor never receives.
Comply — for a company or a programme office
Section titled “Comply — for a company or a programme office”- Companies: buying and complying — lanes and scopes, bands, self-certification, how a passed-on share is attributed, renewal and vesting, waivers, the compliance export, and the SBOM note.
- OSPO and legal pack — classification, identifier and scanner guidance, term certainty, the evidence artifacts with their shapes, the procurement pack, and the permitted claim wording.
- Waivers — public and gratis always, who may grant one, the cooling window, revocation, and how to ask.
Verify — for anyone checking a claim
Section titled “Verify — for anyone checking a claim”- Verify a certificate offline — the three checks, with WebCrypto and OpenSSL, transparency-log inclusion, and the exhaustive verdict matrix.
- Public API reference — the v0 routes, cache behaviour, the error envelope, rate limits, the propagation bound, and the sandbox.
Current stage and source documents
Section titled “Current stage and source documents”Purpose Source License 1.0 was published on 2026-10-01. Licence credentials are sold through our online reseller Paddle. Checkout opens at launch; no payment is taken before then. The public registry opens with the first registered projects; waivers come with the platform’s claim process. Registry, ledger and certificate records labelled sample are examples, not evidence of real transfers. Published API contracts describe the public artifact interface; platform account actions use the platform’s separate workflows and terms.
Read our commitments and current stage, the statutes and the canonical licence for the documents behind these guides.