Terms of use

These terms govern your use of purposesource.org and the public edge API. They are not the software licence — that is the Purpose Source License, which binds users of adopting projects and never mentions this site — and they are not the Entitlement terms a purchaser accepts at checkout, which govern each purchase (section 11). Three documents, three relationships, deliberately kept apart.

1. What this site is

A publisher of documents and published artifacts, operated by the Purpose Source Association (the imprint): the licence text, the registry, the fee schedule, the allocation ledger, certificate status records, the key set, the transparency log, and the documentation. Everything served here is a static file or a cached copy of a published artifact. The Association is registrar and witness for the Purpose Source category — never a licensor of code it registers for others; where the Association itself owns a registered project, that ownership is stated wherever the project appears and the project receives no treatment unavailable to any other.

2. No advice; what governs

Nothing on this site is legal, tax, or financial advice. The plain-English companions to the licence, the documentation, and the frequently asked questions are explanations; they are non-operative. Where an explanation and an operative text differ — the licence text, the statutes, the Entitlement terms — the operative text governs and the explanation is defective. Comparative statements about tax treatment are qualified statements about typical treatment, never guarantees; obtain your own advice.

3. Accuracy and freshness

Published artifacts are eventually consistent by design: the stated propagation bound for coverage-relevant state is five minutes worldwide, and no page promises real time. Pages state when their data was computed. A figure labelled illustrative is illustrative: it describes a mechanism or a schedule, not a recorded transaction. No impact figure exists on this site before a disbursed ledger row exists.

4. Registry claims — summary of the claim terms

Adoption needs no relationship with the Association: a project adopts the licence by committing one file, and the licence is fully operative without a listing. A claim unlocks the verified listing, the badge, and the power to grant waivers, and it is the one place terms addressed to a repository administrator live. The claim flow opens in a later phase; when it does, its terms will provide in substance:

• Attestation. The claimant attests that they hold administrative control of the repository and represent sufficient authority to adopt the licence for it. Copyright stays with the rightsholders; the claim transfers no rights to anyone.
• Waivers are repository-scoped, public, gratis, and revocable prospectively only. Selling or brokering a waiver is a delisting offence.
• Delisting and appeal. Grounds for delisting are published; a delisted repository keeps a neutral tombstone at its URL, and the appeal outcome is recorded.
• No admin-side terms in the LICENSE file, ever. A licence binds users; the relationship between an administrator and the Association is the claim terms, and only there.

5. Certificates, publicity and official marks

Our official certificates can be checked at purposesource.org/verify. An official coverage badge should link to its verification record and display its current status.

You may describe your participation in your own words, in any language, without prior approval. You are welcome to name Purpose Source, link to our website and official social profiles, and use our official logos and badges under the publicity and brand-use policy. The policy applies to our official marks, not to your independent wording. You remain responsible for your own statements and permissions for other organisations’ material.

6. Acceptable use and the public API

Read it, quote it, script against the documented endpoints within the published rate limits, and use conditional requests. Do not scrape certificate identifiers, enumerate organisations through the coverage surface, or bypass the challenge on the forms. A response carrying 429 and Retry-After means exactly that.

7. Intellectual property

The site’s code is published under Apache-2.0 and its brand pages under CC BY-ND, as stated in the repository. The canonical licence text may be copied verbatim; the licence’s name is conditioned on the text being unchanged. “Purpose Source” and the Association’s name are its marks; permission to use them is granted by the publicity and brand-use policy.

8. Availability and liability

Best effort. There is no service-level commitment while the operating team is this small, and none is printed to look larger. No public status page is published yet: the Trust Center states what is monitored today and names the act that produces the page, and the incident history moves there on the day it exists. To the extent the law allows, the Association is not liable for loss arising from use of this site or reliance on an explanation on it; nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and nothing here limits the Association’s obligations under the Entitlement terms or the statutes.

9. Governing law and forum

Swiss law; the courts at the Association’s seat in the canton of Aargau, without prejudice to mandatory consumer protections in your jurisdiction.

10. Changes

When these terms change, the new version is published on this site. Every version, this one included, stays permanently readable at its own numbered address; this one’s is /legal/terms/v1.

11. Purchases

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.

What is sold is the Entitlement: the annual commercial-use licence credential described on the pricing page, created and issued by the Purpose Source Association (address in the imprint). Purchases are sold through Paddle (Paddle.com Market Ltd; Paddle.com Inc. for buyers in the United States; Paddle.com (Canada) Ltd. for buyers in Canada), our merchant of record. The Entitlement terms govern what the Association records, issues and promises; every purchase is also subject to Paddle’s Buyer Terms. Prices are in US dollars per year, before tax: Paddle adds any sales tax or VAT due in the buyer’s country at checkout. Refunds: see the refund policy. Buyer support: billing@purposesource.org (other routes on the contact page), or Paddle at paddle.net.