Open Code. With Purpose.
A project adopts one licence file. Organisations large enough that the fee is trivial pay an annual Purpose Fee to use new releases. Net proceeds route to vetted public-benefit funds after published, capped, audited operating costs — and every version becomes plain Apache-2.0 four years after its release, in the licence text.
computed at 2026-09-03T16:17:53Z · updated within minutes
How it works
Each step is a mechanism you can check today, not a forecast. The licence text and the fee schedule are published, and the ledger publishes every allocation from its first row onwards.
Commit one LICENSE file. That is the whole adoption: no account, and no copyright assignment — ever. Individuals, non-profits and organisations below the published threshold use the software free, and a project can leave the same way it arrived. The text published today is a marked draft under counsel review — it grants nothing, so do not commit it to a repository yet.
Adoption guideAbove the threshold, an organisation buys an annual Entitlement — a Project, a Portfolio, or the Pass, which covers every registered project at once. The record is public in the registry and the proof is machine-readable, with a 60-day cure window and amnesty covenants on purchase.
Fee scheduleAfter published, capped, audited operating costs, net proceeds route through an established charity intermediary to vetted public-benefit category funds. Every allocation is written to an append-only ledger, and every certificate can be checked on the verify page.
Where the money goesFour ways in
One committed file. Everything your community does stays the same. From that day the licence is built so that the biggest companies using your work fund public-benefit causes for the privilege — never you, never us, audited and public.
How adoption worksSame PR. Bigger footprint. Your merged work leaves a verifiable impact record — and a vote on where the money goes.
What a contributor getsThe easiest compliance yes in your queue: one flat annual Pass, every purpose-source product covered, machine-readable proof, 60-day cure, amnesty covenants on purchase.
The Pass, for compliance teamsOpen Source showed us how powerful shared code can be. Purpose Source asks how far that power can reach.
Read the manifestoThe money
The stations between a payer's invoice and a category fund, in order, with the pledge in its only wording.
Where a Purpose Fee goes
Every deduction between what a payer pays and what a public-benefit fund receives, named by us first. Each is a published line, not a discovery for someone else to make.
100% of net proceeds after published, capped operating costs (cap: set with counsel before launch, audited)
The share taken at each station is published on the fee schedule before anyone computes it for us; measured figures travel with each row of the ledger once transactions settle. Every recorded allocation and disbursement is independently reconcilable.
Five pillars
The maintainer already did the hard part: creating something valuable. One committed file is built to turn that latent value into public benefit without turning the project into a fundraiser.
Skill, not wealth, becomes the currency of philanthropy. A developer with nothing to give but time can direct money to causes across a career, because their skill created the economic value.
The deliberate exit from the software value chain into society. Your code can help someone who will never clone your repository; your contribution can matter to someone who has never opened a pull request.
Built on the contribution record your repository host already keeps — a richer impact layer, not a new identity from scratch. Same PR, bigger footprint: a signed, verifiable impact record and a vote on where the project’s charity flow goes. We built this to be the most meaningful line a contribution can add to a record.
More projects, more contributors, better software, more adoption, more Purpose Fees, more public benefit, stronger recognition — and round again. The loop is wired so the community grows stronger not because collaboration got more expensive, but because collaboration gained another reason to exist.
See the loopComparison is not equivalence
Commercial use above a published threshold is conditioned, so no OSI approval is claimed or sought. The comparison page says what you keep, what only this adds, and where the predecessor keeps an edge — in three tables, the third never collapsed.
What is true today
A standing statement of where things are, kept current. Each row says what exists, what is pending, and what is a sample.
Adoption needs nobody's permission. Compliance needs one credential. Everything else is published.