About
The Purpose Source Association.
A Swiss association that registers adoptions, records Entitlements and waivers, and routes Purpose Fees to seven public-benefit category funds. It owns no code, licenses nothing, receives nothing, and publishes everything it can prove.
Mission — the story in three sentences
Purpose Source keeps everything people love about open development — public code, forks, pull requests, free use for individuals and small companies.
Organisations large enough that paying is trivial buy one annual Pass, and net proceeds after published, capped, audited operating costs route to the seven public-benefit category funds, forever.
No distributable private profit — structurally, not by policy; costs published, capped and audited; every recorded allocation and disbursement independently reconcilable.
That is the whole of it, in the wording it is always told in. The rest of this page is the structure that makes those three sentences enforceable rather than aspirational.
What the steward is — and is not
It is a registrar and a router
- It records which repositories have adopted the licence and which have claimed a listing.
- It records Entitlements and waivers in one public registry, and answers one coverage question.
- It routes Purpose Fees to the category funds under published, capped, audited costs.
- It signs certificates about who paid what and who waived what — claims about records, never about code.
- It publishes the ledger, the schedule, the algorithms, the keys, and the kill protocol.
It is never
- An owner. Copyright stays with the rightsholders. Repository administrators hold administrative control of their repositories and represent sufficient authority to adopt the licence there; the Association holds no rights in anyone's code and no mandate over it.
- A licensor of anyone's code. Each contributor grants the licence. The Association issues credentials that satisfy a condition already written into every grant; a Waiver Certificate is the administrator's act, witnessed — never "a licence from the Association".
- A recipient. Neither the Association nor any repository owner can receive routed funds. That is a statutory bar, not a policy.
- A claimant of the predecessor's label. The movement never claims to be open source; it claims to be worth existing anyway.
Governance
The board
A board with an independent majority: a president, a treasurer, and independent members who together form the majority and who hold no role in any registered project, any payer, or any fund partner. A published conflicts register records every declared interest and every recusal. Annual accounts are audited and the audit reports publish on the Trust Center as they exist. Names and the register extract publish with the documents on the day the commercial register confirms them — roles are stated here; people are not.
What no future board can reopen
The statutes fix a small number of clauses beyond the reach of any later majority. Each is a structural bar the "what we can never do" page ties to its instrument, and any change to that page publishes with a visible diff.
- Operating-cost cap
- Costs are capped at a published percentage, audited, and stated before anyone computes them for us.
- No distributable private profit
- Structurally, not by policy: no member, officer or founder can ever receive a distribution.
- Curated funds
- Routing only to the published category funds through vetted intermediaries; never a free-text recipient.
- Gratis waivers
- Repository administrators may waive the fee for a named organisation, in public and for nothing; selling one is a delisting offence.
- Append-only ledger
- Published rows are never edited or deleted; corrections are new rows, annotations are annotations.
- Dissolution to tax-exempt organisations
- On dissolution, remaining funds go to public-benefit, tax-exempt organisations — never to members.
Legal form
- Form
- An association (Verein) under Art. 60 ff. of the Swiss Civil Code, founded in September 2026. The Association is a member-based body with statutes, a general assembly and a board; it has no shareholders and can have no owners.
- Seat
- Canton of Aargau, Switzerland.
- Commercial register
- Registration is required — an association that mainly collects and distributes funds abroad for charitable purposes must register, keep a member register and name a Swiss-domiciled representative — and publication is pending. The register number and the Art. 69 Abs. 2 ZGB representative appear in the imprint and the footer on the day the register publishes them, and not before.
- Tax exemption
- An advance ruling on public-benefit tax exemption has been applied for in Aargau. It is pursued, never assumed: nothing on this site describes the Association as tax-exempt, and no payer's treatment is promised on the strength of a ruling that has not been issued.
- Value-added tax and sanctions
- Entitlements are supplies of services and are treated as such; the Association registers for VAT early rather than late. Payers and recipients are screened against the Swiss, EU, UN and US sanctions lists under a published procedure.
- The funds vehicle, later
- Once routed funds reach the published trigger, a separately supervised vehicle takes the funds pot while the Association keeps the standard, the platform and the movement. A trigger, not a plan for next quarter.
The roadmap, and where we are on it
Six phases, each gated on the one before it by stated preconditions. The current position is marked; nothing beyond it is announced as if it existed.
- Phase A · complete
Bank the idea
The record, the decisions and the pre-registered triggers exist. Zero further cost.
- Phase B · complete
Pre-gate passive layer
Ledger specification, inbound-interest log, prior-art watch, the one-page category definition — drafted, no spend, no announcement.
- Phase C · largely complete — open items listed
Legal foundation
Entity founded; licence 1.0 drafted by licensing counsel and now under review; three-jurisdiction memos in progress; tax ruling applied for; payment-rail pre-clearance and the intermediary agreement in hand. What remains open is stated on the Trust Center, not assumed here.
- Phase D · current position
Founding cohort and platform v0
The escrow campaign — nobody converts alone — and this site as platform v0: licence text, constitution, a curated registry, the badge, the first checkout lane, the first ledger as a published table. Launch is the escrow filling: a published minimum of projects and payers converting on the same day.
- Phase E · the quarter after launch
Platform v1
The claim flow, administrator and contributor dashboards, waivers, category voting in shadow mode, payer declarations, signed certificates, the first quarterly disbursement and the first ledger month pages.
- Phase F · demand-gated
Growth
Clone-based attribution with its anti-gaming guards, the corporate pack, the Portfolio lane when the first organisation with five registered repositories asks, and a separately supervised funds vehicle once routed funds reach the published trigger.
The pre-registered success metrics and kill criteria that would end the roadmap early are a standing page: the kill protocol.
How to reach us
Four addresses at purposesource.org. Response target: five business days — a target, not a service-level commitment; the team is small and we will not print a promise we cannot staff.
hello@purposesource.org
Anything general: adoption, the schedule, a question this site did not answer.
legal@purposesource.org
Licence text, Entitlement terms, counsel correspondence, trademark use.
security@purposesource.org
Vulnerabilities in this site, the edge API, the key set or the transparency log. Acknowledged inside the published target; post-mortems published.
press@purposesource.org
Interviews, quotes, and the claim-language kit for anything you write about a payer.
Challenge-protected forms for contact, abuse reports and data requests are on the contact page.
Where next
Read the constitution Trust Center Documents and register Contact