Questions and answers.

Purpose Source is source-available, not open source: it keeps public code, collaboration and the ability to fork and adapt, with a coverage condition for use by larger organisations. Each release is designed to become Apache-2.0 four years after publication.

The practical difference is where that condition leads. Purpose Fees help fund health, education, poverty relief, humanitarian aid, animal welfare, environmental work and research through listed recipients. Contributors keep their copyright and project teams keep control of their work.

The current licence is Purpose Source License 1.0, published on 2026-10-01. See the side-by-side comparison for the shared features and the differences.

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Purpose Source shares familiar features with open source: public code, collaboration, forks, modification and contributor ownership. It adds a coverage condition for larger organisations, with Purpose Fees funding listed public-benefit recipients after the published costs.

The comparison explains those shared features, the charity model and the few differences to consider. This is an additional choice for a project and its users, not a claim that every licensing model serves the same goals.

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The design combines a shared licence with practical infrastructure: a public registry, versioned fee schedules, machine-readable coverage records and independent verification. Projects do not have to build their own billing systems.

A single canonical text reduces variation between projects, although each organisation still needs to review its own use. The four-year Apache-2.0 conversion, permanent coverage of vested versions and steward-lapse provision give users a path beyond the Association’s continued operation.

These are features of the licence and its supporting design, not proof of adoption or success. The current stage and outstanding publications are listed in our commitments.

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The licence includes three continuity rules:

• The Purpose Condition lapses if the Association ceases to exist with no publicly designated successor, or goes twelve consecutive months in which it neither recorded an Entitlement nor published a dated statement in its transparency log that Entitlements could be obtained. It also lapses on the day named in a signed, published declaration of lapse (§8).
• Vested versions remain covered permanently.
• Each release’s four-year conversion to Apache-2.0 continues under the licence text.

The wind-down protocol describes the remaining operational work, including final transfers and archiving the registry, ledger and verification records. These safeguards are designed to preserve existing rights; they are not a promise that every service continues unchanged. They concern the licence, not the money: if the Association were insolvent, fees not yet passed on would belong to the estate and creditors would come first.

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Yes. The licence allows forks, modifications and redistribution, subject to the same licence conditions as the original. A larger organisation needs coverage for its use of a Purpose Source version unless a waiver or another licence permission applies.

Earlier releases keep the terms they were published under. A release that was MIT or Apache-2.0 stays available on those terms, and each Purpose Source release is designed to become Apache-2.0 after four years.

The licence’s §9 says how a fork maps to coverage: vested code stays vested in forks and modified copies, what others add needs its own permission, and forking gives no power to waive conditions on upstream code. Counsel has still to confirm those rules; changing the repository name does not itself remove the licence condition. See the licence text.

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Two different honesty markers, one rule behind both: nothing on this site is presented as real before it is.

Sandbox certificates are signed with a sandbox key rather than a production key. The verification page recognises the key and renders such a certificate under a red “test certificate” banner — never as a production credential, however valid the signature. Integrators use them to test a policy engine or a procurement workflow end to end without a real Entitlement existing.

Sample data is what a deployment built from the sample dataset shows in its registry, its ledger and its certificates: labelled rows that describe no real repository, no real payment and no real disbursement. Each such surface carries a “Sample data” ribbon. Only a non-production deployment can be built that way: a production build refuses sample data outright at build time, so the two can never be confused on the production host.

One rule ties them together: certificates are verified at purposesource.org/verify and nowhere else. A certificate that verifies anywhere else is not one of ours.

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The Association also develops and sells Rendlio Sheets, a software product, as another activity, booked separately. Purpose Fee money never funds it, and its money never enters the Purpose Fee account. Any project the Association owns that is registered here is marked Association-owned and receives no treatment unavailable to any other project.

The role claim is scoped accordingly: the steward is registrar and router, never a rights-holder in code it registers for others. Where it is itself the rights-holder of a registered project, it is a licensor of that project like any other, the ownership is stated wherever the project appears, and the statutes bind it to that disclosure.

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Use the review pack to check the licence against your organisation’s policy. One canonical text and published coverage records make the model consistent across registered projects.

A policy requiring OSI-approved open source may need a separate approval for new Purpose Source releases. Package channels set their own rules; acceptance is assessed for the channel you actually use. Each release is designed to become Apache-2.0 after four years.

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The adoption step is one unchanged LICENSE file. No Association account, application, signature or ongoing report is required simply to use the licence. PURPOSE.yml is optional. Purpose Source License 1.0 was published on 2026-10-01, and its canonical text is that file.

As with any licence change, you need the rights to apply it and must keep existing notices. The adoption guide covers that check. Once the public registry is live, a repository under the licence’s unchanged text is registered and listed, with its own page and badge, whether or not anyone claims it. Waiver powers and the other administrator powers come with the platform’s own optional claim process.

You can leave at any time by changing the licence for future releases to one you have the right to use. There is no exit fee, minimum term or notification form. Earlier releases and rights already granted stay intact, including vested coverage and each release’s four-year Apache-2.0 conversion. See leaving.

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The licence has no copyleft requirement to relicense your own software merely because it uses a Purpose Source dependency. It also adds no source-disclosure or network-copyleft duty. Your application and its other dependencies keep their own terms.

That is separate from coverage of the Purpose Source component itself. The licence applies its size-based condition to use of that component; it has no blanket exemption for indirect or transitive dependencies, although under section 4 incidental benefit and merely passing the software on do not count as use for an organisation. An organisation’s covered use can be satisfied through its Entitlement or a recorded waiver.

There is no blanket claim that package registries reject this licence. Each registry, distribution and employer has its own acceptance rules. Check the relevant channel and compatibility of the actual combination. See the review pack and adoption guide.

For a concrete example, NuGet supports packaging a custom licence file in .txt or .md format. That is support for licence metadata, not approval of this licence or of every downstream use.

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Yes — that is the waiver, and it is the administrator’s power, not ours. The licence vests in the Project Steward (the administrator of the canonical repository) the power to excuse a named organisation from the Purpose Condition for that repository. The Association records and witnesses it; the administrator grants it.

The rules are fixed and public:

• Public, always. Every waiver appears in the waiver registry. A private exemption would make coverage unanswerable, and is the side-deal this structure exists to prevent.
• Gratis, always. Selling one is a delisting offence. A waived organisation receives a licence-status certificate only — never a supporter or impact certificate, because it funded nothing.
• Repository-scoped, grantable and revocable by any verified administrator, with every co-administrator notified and one shared audit log.
• Revocation is prospective, with versions vested by the same formula that protects payers.
• A 72-hour cooling window. The organisation is covered immediately, but permanent vesting attaches only when the window closes; a waiver revoked inside it vests nothing, though what it permitted before the revocation stays lawful. Grants require a step-up re-authentication, so a compromised account cannot mint permanent rights in the minutes before anyone notices.
• Unclaimed repositories have no waivers. Waiving requires the two-minute claim.

The full description is on the administrator page.

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No. Purpose Fees support listed public-benefit recipients. Contributors keep their copyright and may receive recognition of eligible work through an attributed Impact Share and an opt-in, verifiable participation certificate. The share is not money, ownership or a right to payment.

Contributors can also choose among the seven categories or leave their share to the Association, which directs it each month to where it is most needed. Choices are advisory; the board decides finally. Contributor choices begin in a recording-only trial; at least a quarter of data and a published fairness and abuse review are required before they can affect transfers.

The contributor guide explains the method, privacy choices and display rules.

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Because a leaderboard would rank people by a number an algorithm attributes to them, reward optimising for that number, and expose contributors whose employers would rather they were not listed at all. None of those is recognition; all three are the failure mode of it.

Recognition here is coarse on purpose. Your points are shown to you alone, and everyone else sees you as credited; a per-person currency figure appears only above a published materiality floor, because below it the number is real but too small to mean what a reader would take it to mean — precision-shaming, not transparency. There are no ranks and no bands; profiles are claimed, not scraped; a certificate is something you choose to show, not a table someone else compiles about you.

Aggregates are different. A project’s lifetime public-benefit figure and the network’s ledger total publish in full, because they are ledger facts about money, not judgements about people. The impact page explains where the gate falls.

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The certificate records coverage. It does not rate a company’s social or environmental performance.

The fee, the allocation rules and the published ledger make the mechanism inspectable. Organisations may describe their participation in their own words. The Association does not approve their publicity; its brand-use policy concerns official logos and badges.

Prominence is not for sale. The badge is the same for every lane and every amount and shows the coverage recorded. A status certificate records status; a payment certificate also records a payment.

The public record lets readers check the underlying facts for themselves.

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The licence’s free-use test has two parts (section 5). An organisation qualifies while both are true across its consolidated group for each member’s latest completed tax year:

1. Fewer than 100 people, counting employees and independent contractors together.
2. Less than one million US dollars in revenue. The figure is not indexed; other currencies convert at a published central-bank or IMF average rate, chosen consistently.

Below both, there is no fee or registration requirement. Non-profit and public-benefit bodies, public educational institutions and public bodies meet the threshold whatever their size; a commercial organisation such a body controls is measured like any other. Individuals acting for themselves also qualify; work for a larger organisation uses that organisation’s position.

Above either threshold, use of the Purpose Source component needs coverage or another permission under the licence. The licence includes a 60-day cure period, permanent rights in vested versions and Apache-2.0 terms for each release after four years.

Size is self-assessed; the licence provides no audit right. Prices and revenue bands live in the separate fee schedule. The licence text defines the test and permissions.

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Your organisation plus every organisation under common control with it — direct or indirect, through ownership, voting power, contract, or otherwise. The wording is the control language of the PolyForm Small Business licence, used verbatim rather than paraphrased, because that text has already been read by the programme offices that will read this one.

The consequence is the point: a small subsidiary of a large parent is inside the parent’s group, and a holding structure cannot split itself below the threshold. Both the headcount test and the revenue test are measured over the group as a whole.

Why it is drawn this way: a revenue-only test lets a well-funded, pre-revenue company with a thousand engineers ride free, and an entity-only test lets the largest organisations ride free through structure. Either would be the opposite of the design.

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The licence allows 60 days to restore the Purpose Condition after it first stops being satisfied. If the organisation obtains the needed coverage in that period, permission continues uninterrupted. Already vested versions remain covered permanently.

This provides time to address growth past the threshold or a coverage lapse. For growth past the threshold the 60 days run from the end of the tax year in which the organisation first grew past it, or from the day it knew or should reasonably have known that reliable figures showed the threshold exceeded; at most 60 such days count in any twelve months. The registry’s separate 30-day expiry-grace status is a coverage-record rule; it is not a replacement for the licence’s cure clause.

See section 6 of the licence and the company guide.

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Under the licence (section 9), a version within your credential’s scope stays covered permanently if it was published on or before the end of your term.

Annual coverage includes the back catalogue and releases published during the term. Renewing extends the cutoff for new versions. Non-renewal, project exit or delisting does not remove what is already vested. A waiver follows its own term, with revocation or expiry acting prospectively.

You can keep using covered versions when you stop renewing. Each release also becomes Apache-2.0 after four years. See the company guide for the record and renewal details.

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SPDX listing of PurposeSource-1.0 was requested on 2026-10-01 and is pending. Until it is listed, use LicenseRef-PurposeSource-1.0; the licence page shows the current status.

A review can work from the exact text in the meantime: one shared licence, a published hash and a signed coverage record. The review pack explains custom SBOM identifiers and a policy rule tied to that text and record. A scanner listing helps tools recognise the licence; your organisation still chooses its approval policy.

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No. There is no direct-donation route. Coverage comes from an Entitlement bought under the published schedule, or from a waiver a repository’s administrator grants.

Purpose Source License 1.0 has no Donation Entitlement.

For what is sold, see Project and Pass coverage.

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The public ledger is designed to connect receipts, running costs, support, reserve movements and transfers to their published evidence. The full money rule is:

100% of net Purpose Fees go to the listed charities within 30 days of each payout, after published, capped costs: running costs at most 15% of a year’s net fees, and the reserve at most 5% of each payout until it holds six months of costs, so at least 80% every year. Listed supporters lower the costs, never what is passed on. No cap is ever raised for a purchase already made. Every cost and transfer is published monthly.

Running costs are capped at 15% and reserve retention at 5%, using the fee base the statutes use, net Purpose Fee proceeds: after the payment provider’s fee, without the taxes charged at purchase, and after refunds and chargebacks. No cap is ever raised for a purchase already made. With both fully used, at least 80% of that base reaches listed recipients. The reserve starts at zero, so up to 5% can be retained from every payout until it reaches its published target, six months of running costs. Support for eligible costs reduces what is charged to fees.

What the law makes us pay, we pay. Taxes, court orders, and any refund or chargeback the payment provider can no longer set off against later fees are not ours to choose. We pay them from the Association’s own money, never by charging them to the fees as costs. If our own money ever falls short, or a court or an authority orders it, the law can reach money we hold, including fees not yet passed on, and no promise of ours can prevent that. If it happens, we publish it, as far as the law allows.

Each payout is allocated before it is transferred, and the transfers are normally initiated on the 25th of the month it is credited, within thirty days of its credit. The ledger records the allocation, invoices and recipient receipts. This makes the published records reconcilable; it is not a claim that every intermediate banking step is public.

From the year routed volume passes the published threshold, a licensed auditor independent of the board checks the fee account, the reserve account and the pass-on every year under agreed-upon procedures, and its report is published. No completed audit is claimed today. No transfer has been made yet. See the complete method.

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The Purpose Fee is structured as a software-licensing fee, not a charitable donation by the purchaser. Deductibility and accounting treatment depend on the buyer’s jurisdiction and circumstances. A purchase does not come with a promise of tax relief.

The Association does not claim tax-exempt status. Its tax request addresses the treatment of passed-on fees and retained costs; the outcome is to be published, including any consequences for the model. The documents register tracks the relevant papers. Applicable sales taxes are handled through the purchase arrangements and the merchant of record.

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Who pays the movement’s running costs. The movement’s direct costs — hosting, domains, email, monitoring, payment-rail charges, transfer charges — are paid first by listed supporters and otherwise from Purpose Fees, within the constitutional cap. Supporters are listed for each month they paid, by name and amount, and drop off when they stop. Nothing about the movement’s promise depends on who is on the list.

“Direct costs” is a closed kind, not a judgement: third-party invoices for services that exist only for the movement, billed to an account used only for the movement, including the transfer charges of each outbound transfer to a listed recipient — and the pay of the people who do the work of running the movement, which is a cost class like any other inside the same cap, published as one line per function and never by name (Can anyone be paid out of the Purpose Fees?). Never a bill that also serves another activity of the Association; those are costs of the Association’s other activities and are never charged to Purpose Fees. Beyond the capped running costs, Purpose Fees carry exactly one more published, capped line — the reserve retention until the operations reserve reaches its target — and nothing else, ever. The eligible classes and the cap are in the statutes; the table — every invoice, every support line, every reserve movement, every transfer — is on the transparency page, month by month, from the end of the first month with a Purpose Fee payout.

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A cost supporter is anyone who settles one of the movement’s listed direct invoices in place of the Purpose Fee account: another activity of the Association, a member, an outside sponsor, a future project of the Association. Support is per invoice, per month, per supporter, and every supporter is listed for the month by name and amount on the transparency page.

Three limits keep it honest. Support never passes through the Purpose Fee account — a supporter pays the supplier, and the fee account only ever sees payouts from the payment rail going in and its four published kinds of line going out: transfers to the listed recipients, listed third-party invoices, personnel costs, and the reserve retention. Support never exceeds the month’s running costs: anything a supporter wants to give beyond them is that supporter’s own donation to a listed recipient, in its own name, and is not part of this model. And support is listed or it did not happen: undisclosed support is the one thing the model forbids, because it is the one thing that could make the published cost line flatter than the truth.

One widening, published like everything else: a supporter or sponsor may also settle a personnel cost, as a listed line that never touches the fee account. The source that bore each personnel line is published with the month, alongside the function it paid for (Can anyone be paid out of the Purpose Fees?).

The full bill is always published, whoever paid it. A reader always sees what the movement costs, and separately who paid.

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Its row goes to zero and falls off the list. The direct costs it was settling are charged to Purpose Fees instead, within the constitutional cap — the state the pledge already describes, so no sentence on this site changes. When every supporter stops, the whole direct-cost line is charged to fees, still inside the cap. When a new supporter appears, a row appears.

If a year’s direct costs would exceed the cap and no supporter steps in, the part above the cap is not charged to Purpose Fees: it is paid from the Association’s other money — the operations reserve, sponsors or other unrestricted funds. The cap is never exceeded by charging, and no cap is ever raised for a purchase already made (statutes, Art. 6 para. 4, Art. 22 para. 4).

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Yes — inside one published cap, under a written contract, and in public. Nobody is paid at founding. Here is the rule in plain words.

One cap covers everything, people included. At most 15% of a financial year’s Purpose Fees, net of the payment processor’s fee, may be charged to those fees — and that one cap covers every running cost of the Purpose Source activity: hosting, domains, email, monitoring, payment-rail charges, the transfer charges on the outbound transfers, and the pay of anyone who does the work, employee, contractor or board member. Personnel is a cost class like any other inside it, not a line of its own outside it (Art. 6, Art. 6f). A month may exceed the cap; the year may not. No cap is ever raised for a purchase already made, and the cap is never exceeded by charging: whatever would exceed it for the year is not charged to Purpose Fees, and is paid from money of the Association that is not Purpose Fees — a listed supporter, the operations reserve or other unrestricted money. Pay already earned is never cut: it stays owed and, where the cap cannot hold it, is paid from that other money.

What a payment requires. A written contract, at or below the market rate for the work, and the compensation rule the board adopts and publishes. Pay to a board member stays within a maximum per function that the general assembly approves; within it, the other board members give their prior, minuted approval of the contract, even if they are paid themselves. The person concerned takes no part in that decision (Art. 68 ZGB) and never releases a payment to themselves; if the board cannot approve, the general assembly does. Every approval is published. Before anyone starts paid work, the Association registers as an employer.

How it is published. Monthly, as one line per function — “platform maintenance and support”, not a person’s name — with the source that bore it: Purpose Fees, the operations reserve, a listed supporter, or another activity of the Association (Art. 6e). Nobody is paid at founding; the founding minutes record it and the unpaid period is published with every monthly table until that changes.

The reserve beside it. The Association keeps an operations reserve in an account that is not the fees account, with a published target of six months of the activity’s running costs — half of the previous financial year’s direct costs, people included, set and published by the board each January. It fills from the other activities’ income, from sponsors and other unrestricted money, and from Purpose Fees at at most 5% of the Purpose Fees of each payout until the target is reached — then nothing; published as its own line, reserve retention. It may be spent only on running costs not charged to Purpose Fees because of the cap, personnel included, and on the transfer charges of the final sweep if the Association is ever wound up. It is never a refund reserve (Art. 6g).

What that does to the promise. The pledge names both capped costs. Worst case, published as such: with every cap drawn in full — running costs 15%, reserve retention 5% — at least 80% of a financial year’s net Purpose Fee proceeds pass on to the listed recipients (100 − 15 − 5). Net means after the payment provider’s fee, without the taxes charged at purchase, and after refunds and chargebacks — never the amount the buyer paid. The reserve starts at zero, so until it holds its target up to 5% of every payout can be retained into it, and sponsors, the other activities and other unrestricted money can fill it sooner. While the reserve is below its target, more than 80% passes on only when running costs charged to fees stay below their 15% cap or less than 5% is retained.

How you check it. Read the fees account’s published statement: its outgoing lines are of four kinds and no other — transfers to the listed recipients, listed third-party invoices, personnel costs, and the reserve retention. Every one of them is inside a published cap, every invoice and every line has its evidence beside it, and the running-year total against the 15% cap is printed with each month. If a personnel line appears without its function, its source, and — for a board member — the published approval of the others, the model is broken and you can see it.

Why it is built this way: the work of running the movement has to be paid for by someone, and pretending otherwise only hides who. A single cap that covers people and invoices alike is one number a reader can check with a calculator against the bank statement, which is worth more than a promise that nobody is ever paid.

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