What we can never do

Each line below is a structural bar, not a promise of good behaviour. A promise can be revised by a future board; every line here names the mechanism that holds it, in the second column, rather than asking to be believed.

Most of them are written into the statutes, or into the licence text itself. An amendment of the statutes needs two thirds of all members and is published with a visible comparison (Art. 22). A protected provision — the minimum share and net proceeds, the cap, the limits of the reserve retention, the publication of every cost item charged to Purpose Fees, every support payment, every movement of the operations reserve and every transfer to a recipient organisation (not its form and timing), and the immutable core of the licence for existing contributions — changes only with the consent of all members, on wording published with its reasons at least ninety days before the resolution (thirty days for a resolution before the first paid sale), and only for the future. One paragraph cannot be amended at all, Art. 22 para. 5: funds are never distributed to, and never revert to, members, founders, board members or persons close to them; Purpose Fees and routed funds never fund another activity; and on dissolution the assets serve only public-benefit or public purposes. The rest are held differently, and this page says so rather than lending them the statutes’ weight — their second column opens with Published rule, and the note below says what that is worth. Changes to this page publish with a visible diff.

We can never…	Bound by
Become a licensor, sublicensor, or rights-holder in 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	Statutes Art. 4 · Licence, Section 2 (the Association does not own or license the code it registers for others) and Section 3 (each grant is per contributor)
Require a copyright assignment from a contributor — contributors keep their copyright	Statutes Art. 4 · Licence, Section 3 (contributors keep their copyright)
Arbitrate a dispute inside a repository — attribution rivalry, a disagreement between co-administrators, a contested waiver — the registry records the outcome a project’s own governance reached and takes no position on it	Statutes Art. 4 — registrar of records and router of funds, never a party between a project and its users · waivers — outcomes recorded, never arbitrated
Distribute private profit to members, officers, founders, or staff	Statutes Art. 5 — no distributable private profit, structurally
Pay routed funds to the Association, a board member, a member, or a repository owner	Statutes Art. 5 — recipient bar
Pay contributors for contributions, in money or anything of monetary value	Statutes Art. 5 · Contributors
Rank contributors by money, or show a per-contributor currency figure below the published materiality floor — below the floor a contributor’s record carries points only, shown to that contributor alone, and no money-ranked leaderboard exists above it either	Published rule: algorithms — the materiality gate, published with its algorithm version before that version is used · contributors — what an Impact Share never shows
Approach a contributor who never wrote to us, or open unsolicited licence-change pull requests across repositories that never asked — the adoption flow hands a maintainer a link, and the branch and the pull request are created under their own identity; the only channels that ever invite a contributor are this site, the badge, and the repository itself	Published rule: adoption guide — no account, no registration and no message from us is a prerequisite · press — no cold outreach to press either: silence from us is the policy working
Charge a shared bill, or the Association’s general overheads, to Purpose Fees; pay anyone out of Purpose Fees outside the one running-cost cap, without a written contract at or below market rate, or — for a board member — above the maximum the general assembly approved for the function, or without the prior minuted approval of the other board members (or, where the board cannot approve, of the general assembly), the payee taking no part in it; or exceed a cap. No cap is ever raised for a purchase already made	Statutes Art. 6 — one cap, direct costs only · Art. 6f — personnel costs and remuneration · Art. 22 para. 4 — a change to a cap reaches only later purchases
Say that everything a payer pays reaches the listed recipients — the uncapped claim is forbidden in every channel; what may be said is one published string carrying every qualifier, held in one place and re-checked on every build of this site	Statutes Art. 6 — only capped, itemised direct costs may ever be charged · Art. 6e — every line published to its evidence · the pledge in its only wording
Hold Purpose Fees anywhere but the one dedicated fee account, or let that account pay anything but its four published kinds of line — transfers to the listed recipients, listed third-party invoices, personnel costs, and the reserve retention	Statutes Art. 6a — the fee account and the pass-through
Put anything between the fee account and a listed recipient — no intermediary, no pooled vehicle, no instruction that carries no money, no handling fee; each recipient’s transfer leaves the account as its own line	Statutes Art. 6a — four kinds of outgoing line and no other, one transfer per recipient · Art. 6e — one published line per recipient, with its date, its charges and its receipt
Let Purpose Fee money fund any other activity of the Association, in any form — a loan, a shared service charge, “temporarily”	Statutes Art. 6c — routed funds never fund another activity
Publish a personnel cost by name rather than by function, pay a board member without a published approval, raise the running-cost cap or the reserve’s limits without the consent of all members after published notice, or for a purchase already made, or retain for the reserve above its published rate or target	Statutes Art. 6f — personnel costs, published by function · Art. 6g — the reserve · Art. 22 paras. 2 to 4 — protected provisions
Route funds to any recipient that is not on the published Recipient List, or outside the seven categories; add a recipient by free text or on anyone’s nomination alone, or open the list to self-registration; loosen the Recipient Standard below its floor in the statutes	Statutes Art. 7 — the Recipient List and the Recipient Standard
Sell a waiver, broker an exemption, or let a repository administrator sell one	Statutes Art. 10 · Licence, Section 2 (a Waiver is the maintainers’ record in the public Registry) and Section 9 (recorded free of charge); selling one is a delisting offence
Set a price privately, per customer	Statutes Art. 11 — one published, versioned schedule
Edit or delete a published ledger row	Statutes Art. 12 — append-only ledger, hash chain
Publish an impact figure, an impact certificate or an impact claim before a transfer has settled — every published figure links to the bank line and the receipt behind it, so a figure with nothing behind it has nothing to link	Statutes Art. 12 — the append-only ledger every figure reconciles against · Art. 6e — every line links to its evidence · certificate policy — the two issuable classes attest a settled payment or a recorded status, never impact
Narrow the free-tier threshold in a successor licence version applied to existing contributions	Statutes Art. 13 · contributor instrument, immutable core item 1
Lengthen or remove the four-year conversion to Apache-2.0 for existing contributions	Statutes Art. 13 · Licence, Section 7 · immutable core item 2
Offer a per-project licence parameter — one canonical text per version, the same file byte for byte in every adopting repository, verified against the published hash before it is committed	Published rule: the licence — one canonical text with zero parameters, and a published version never changes · adoption guide — the byte-exact text and the hash to check it against
Withdraw a version a payer has already vested	Licence, Section 9 — once a part has vested, nothing takes it away
Leave adopters stranded if the Association fails	Licence, Section 8 — if the Association stops, the condition lapses; Statutes Art. 13 para. 3 — every licence version carries that backstop · Art. 23 para. 5 — records stay verifiable and the registry is handed on
Stop the Purpose Source activity overnight, or without the members — a stop needs two thirds of all members and a serious reason published with the decision, and it is published at least three months before issuing ends, unless the law, a court or an authority requires an earlier end or makes continuing impossible	Statutes Art. 14 · if the activity stops
Keep remaining funds on dissolution, or pass them to members — after creditors, the last month is locked and transferred to the listed recipients, and what remains goes to tax-exempt public benefit	Statutes Art. 23 — creditors first, then dissolution to tax-exempt public benefit
Add an audit right, an inspection clause, or a reporting duty to the licence	Licence, Section 5 (you assess the threshold yourself; nobody may audit you) and Section 10 (no audit and no report); the drafting brief excludes them permanently
Describe Purpose Source with the label of the predecessor licensing model — the term is used to deny the classification and never to claim it, and each occurrence in this site’s copy carries a reviewed marker accounting for it or the build fails	Published rule: comparison — the classification stated in the term itself, beside the honest answer wherever the predecessor keeps an edge · one pattern file, run over this site’s source and its rendered pages on every build
Print a verification address other than the one on the verification page	Published rule: keys — the fixed wording, pinned by the same gate

How to read the clause pointers

Statutes articles link to the English working text of Statutes v1 on this site; the German original prevails once published, and the article numbering is the same in both. Licence section numbers refer to Purpose Source License 1.0. Where a row names both, the statutes bind the Association and the licence binds everyone.

Where a row’s second column opens with Published rule, no article of the statutes and no section of the licence carries that bar, and the row says so instead of implying otherwise: it is held by a rule published on this site — in the Trust Center, in the documentation, or in the licence index — and the row links to the document that carries it. Such a rule is published before it is relied on and versioned when it changes. The two that govern what may be said — the predecessor label and the verification address — are additionally held by one pattern file that every build of this site runs over its own source and its own rendered output, so copy that breaks either fails the build instead of reaching a reader. The same file holds the pledge to the single wording Art. 6 and Art. 6e make true, which is why the row about it cites those articles. A published rule is a weaker bar than an article of the statutes, and that is why it is labelled rather than blended in: an article of the statutes changes only by a vote of two thirds of all members, a protected provision only with the consent of all of them and only for the future, and Art. 22 para. 5 not at all, while a published rule is changed by publishing a new version of it, in the open, with the diff.