Entitlement terms

1. What an Entitlement is

An Entitlement is the annual commercial-use licence credential the Purpose Source Association records and issues for a purchasing organisation, for the band and lane it bought at the Purpose Fee stated in the published schedule: a credential in the public registry and a signed certificate naming the organisation. The purchase itself is made from Paddle.com, our online reseller and Merchant of Record, under Paddle's Buyer Terms; these terms govern the Entitlement: what the Association records, issues and promises to the purchasing organisation.

Two relationships are kept deliberately apart. The Purpose Source License binds users of adopting projects, is granted by each project's own contributors, and contains no obligation to pay anyone anything. These terms bind the purchaser and the Association, and say nothing about any project's code. The Association is never a licensor of code it registers for others (Art. 4 of the statutes), so an Entitlement is never "a licence from the Association". Where the Association itself owns a registered project, that ownership is stated wherever the project appears, and the Entitlement covers it on the same terms as any other registered project — no more, no less.

2. What the purchaser receives

• A registry credential. A public record that the purchasing organisation holds a current Entitlement of a stated lane and period — under its registered name if it asked at checkout to be listed, otherwise as an unlisted organisation under its company identifier — plus a signed entitlement record any third party can verify offline: the artifact a scanner or a procurement tool reads.
• A certificate. An ES256-signed credential, logged in the transparency log before delivery, verifiable at the verification page or offline with the published keys.
• Steward covenants. The Association covenants: to keep the credential recorded and readable for its term and afterwards as history; to answer coverage questions from published artifacts only; to apply the published schedule to the purchaser on the same terms as to everyone else; not to disclose the purchaser's contact person; and not to enforce, or authorise the enforcement of, any claim it holds against the purchaser in respect of the use the credential covers.
• Amnesty covenants on purchase — see section 7.
• Permission to share. Describe your participation in your own words and use our name, website, official social profiles, logos and badges under the simple brand-use rules in section 8.

3. Our roles and responsibilities

Project stewards look after their code. Purpose Source looks after the Entitlement. Project stewards manage the development, maintenance and publication of their projects. The Association administers the Entitlement, its coverage record and the commitments it makes in these terms.

Rights to use the software come from its licensors under the project's licence. Software support, warranties and liability are governed by that licence and any separate agreement with the relevant provider. An Entitlement does not add a software warranty, an intellectual-property indemnity, a provenance audit or a support service, or transfer responsibility for a project's code to the Association. It does not create new guarantees or obligations for a project steward.

Where the Association owns a registered project, that role is disclosed and its responsibilities in that capacity remain governed by the project's licence and any separate agreement.

A purchase carries the published coverage and the commitments below. It gives no roadmap priority, listing prominence or governance rights. Category selections are advisory as to routing (Art. 8). The Purpose Fee is invoiced as a software-licensing business fee; its tax treatment depends on the purchaser's jurisdiction and circumstances.

4. Band self-certification

Price depends on the purchaser's band, and the purchaser states its own band: one binding, timestamped tick at checkout, declaring the consolidated group's revenue range for its prior tax year. That is the whole mechanism. One required checkbox confirms authority, the consolidated-group revenue band and acceptance of these terms and the refund policy. Its full statements are on the purchase acceptance page, together with the Terms & purchase details. Public naming remains a separate, optional choice.

• No audit right, no inspection clause, no reporting duty — not in the licence and not here. An audit clause is a categorical procurement veto, and its permanent exclusion is on the list of what we can never do.
• Under-certification is a true-up, not a trap. Where a purchaser certifies a band lower than the one that applied, the remedy is payment of the difference for the period concerned. The Entitlement is voided only for bad faith — a knowingly false certification — and a voided Entitlement is recorded as voided rather than quietly deleted.
• Growth mid-term does not reprice the term. Crossing into a higher band during a paid term takes effect at renewal. The licence's own 60-day cure window governs the licence side.
• Usage declarations and attribution. A purchaser of the Pass may name up to fifty registered repositories it uses, or none; naming is optional and never a condition of purchase or renewal. A Project purchaser names none: the repository it buys is its scope. The purchaser's share of what is passed on is attributed by lane — for a Project, all of it to the chosen repository; for the Pass, 1% to each named repository and the rest equally across all registered repositories, counted at each month's lock. Attribution reaches only the listed recipient organisations, by the category or listed recipient organisation designated for each repository and otherwise under the allocation key the board publishes before each month, and never a project, a contributor, an owner or an administrator; it is advisory, and the Association's board decides finally (Art. 5, Art. 8). A declaration is used for attribution and aggregate reporting and is never published as a per-purchaser list of dependencies.

5. Vesting, term, and renewal

The formula is one line, stated per version here and on every certificate:

A version is vested if and only if its publication date falls on or before the end of the paid term.

The licence (§9) vests per part: a part is yours to keep once the credential covers it and it was public by the end of the term. Every part of a version public by the term's end is such a part, so this line never claims more than the licence gives; a part public before the term's end that ships only in a later release vests under §9 and outside this line.

• At activation that is the whole back catalogue of every covered project, plus everything published during the term.
• Renewal extends the term end into the next year's releases. Terms are annual and renew automatically unless the purchaser turns renewal off: a card purchase renews each year through the merchant of record, and an invoiced purchase through a yearly invoice on the same terms as the first (30 days to pay; the invoice lapses 14 days after its due date). The purchaser may turn renewal off at any time before the renewal date. The renewal reminder states the renewal date, the price then in force and how to turn renewal off, and a price rise reaches a renewal only after 90 days' notice.
• Vesting is permanent. Non-renewal, project exit, delisting, waiver revocation, and the Association's own failure cannot reach a vested version. Lapse acts on versions published afterwards, never on what is already deployed.
• Lapse has a grace window. For 30 days after expiry, coverage answers lapsed-in-grace rather than no; after it, the licence's own cure window governs.
• Lanes. Project (exactly one registered repository, chosen at purchase) and the Pass (every registered repository). Both are offered at checkout, at the prices of the published schedule, and the registry record and the certificate name the scope bought. The ordering rule is published: the Pass always dominates at scale, and no stack of single-lane Entitlements may beat it.

6. Payment, invoicing, and refunds

• Merchant of record. Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com. Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Paddle provides all customer service inquiries and handles returns. Paddle (Paddle.com Market Ltd; Paddle.com Inc. for buyers in the United States; Paddle.com (Canada) Ltd. for buyers in Canada) is the seller to the purchaser; Paddle issues the invoice, handles card processing and accounts for indirect tax. Card and bank details never reach the Association.
• Paddle's Buyer Terms. Every purchase is also subject to Paddle's Buyer Terms. For a purchase Paddle invoices, they form part of the order.
• Invoices. A purchase above the card limit in the fee schedule is invoiced by Paddle and paid by bank transfer in USD, EUR or GBP. The invoice is due 30 days after its date and lapses if still unpaid 14 days after the due date. Bank charges and any amount withheld are the purchaser's.
• Refunds. Every payment, the first and each renewal, carries a 14-day money-back guarantee: a full refund, for any reason, on a request made within 14 days of the payment (for an invoiced purchase, of the day the payment reaches Paddle). Paddle makes every refund, and may also refund a purchase under its own refund policy and Buyer Terms, or where the law requires it; nothing in these terms limits that. The refund policy says the same in plain words.
• What a refund or chargeback changes. A full refund of the current term's payment revokes the credential prospectively, together with that term's certificates, and the registry records the revocation; a full refund of an earlier term's payment revokes that term's certificates and leaves the current term standing. As licence 1.0 §9 provides, a term refunded or charged back in full vests nothing, use during that term before the refund stays lawful, and a partial refund, or a refund for the Association's own failure, leaves vesting untouched; terms whose payments stand keep what they vested. Where the Association has failed to record or maintain the credential, it asks Paddle to refund a proportion of the fee and says so in the ledger. A chargeback affects only the term its payment was for: while a chargeback of the current term's payment is open, the credential is suspended and coverage answers no. If the chargeback is upheld, a chargeback of the current term's payment revokes the credential prospectively, together with that term's certificates, and the registry records the revocation; one of an earlier term's payment revokes only that term's certificates. A chargeback does not by itself affect the purchaser's other terms.
• Band corrections. A purchaser that certified the wrong band in good faith may correct it; the difference is invoiced or refunded through Paddle, and the correction is a new row rather than an edit.
• Where the money goes. 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. What is passed on goes directly to the listed recipients of the seven categories on the Association's published Recipient List. The running costs of the activity — its own invoices and the pay of anyone who does the work — are charged to fees only inside one cap of 15% of the financial year's Purpose Fees, net of the payment processor's fee, and the operations reserve retains at most 5% of each payout until its published target of six months of costs; no cap is ever raised for a purchase already made, and both caps are published. People appear as one line per function, never by name. The full fee stack, the caps, the direct-cost classes, who pays the movement's running costs, the Recipient Standard, the lock-before-sweep rule, and the ledger methodology are on where the money goes. Every figure there is labelled illustrative until a settled transaction measures it.
• Sanctions screening. The Association screens purchasing organisations against the applicable sanctions lists before recording a credential, and declines rather than records where it must.

7. Commitments concerning past use

Purchase includes commitments from the Association and the project's steward of record not to bring claims they hold concerning the purchaser's past use of the covered software. These are the amnesty covenants on purchase.

Each commitment applies to the rights held by the party giving it. Other contributors' rights remain governed by the project's licence; purchase does not release claims on their behalf. The licence's 60-day cure window also continues to apply.

A purchase whose term vests nothing because it was refunded or charged back in full carries none of these commitments. Commitments given with an earlier term whose payment stands are not affected.

8. Publicity and official marks

9. Data, records, and confidentiality

What the Association processes as controller, on what basis, and for how long is in the privacy notice. In short: the purchasing organisation is named publicly only if it ticks List our organisation's name publicly at checkout; otherwise it appears as an unlisted organisation under a reference code that does not itself display its name. The reference code, the lane, what the Entitlement covers, its term dates, its status and the fee amount of each purchase remain public. A domain the purchaser verifies resolves publicly to that code and can identify the organisation, so public naming being off does not guarantee anonymity. The contact person's name and email are never published. Accounting records are kept for ten years because Swiss law requires it.

10. Liability, term, and applicable law

• Liability. The Association's liability under these terms is limited to the fee paid for the current term, save for intent and gross negligence and save for anything that cannot lawfully be limited. It has no liability for any project's code.
• Termination. The purchaser may stop renewing at any time, with no exit fee and no notice period. The Association may terminate for a knowingly false certification or for sanctions reasons, and records the termination and its ground. A breach of the official-marks rules may result in withdrawal of permission for that use of the marks; it does not, by itself, terminate the Entitlement or affect vested versions.
• Assignment. An Entitlement follows the organisation, including through a change of control, on notice to the Association so the registry record stays accurate.
• Changes. These terms are versioned at permanent URLs. A change is a new version at a new URL and applies to a purchaser at its next renewal, never mid-term.
• Governing law and forum. Swiss law; the courts at the Association's seat in the canton of Aargau, without prejudice to mandatory consumer protections. The language of the operative instrument is English unless a filing requires otherwise.

11. Questions before you buy

Send them to legal@purposesource.org or through the contact route; the published target is 5 business days. The Association cannot pre-approve an interpretation of the licence or give legal or tax advice, but it can point at the operative clause and the published record — and it will say "we do not know yet" where that is the answer.