Documentation

Step-by-step guides to the dashboard, the rules behind them, published methods and stable API contracts. Start with the overview or all guides and answers if you are new to the movement.

Use the app — step by step

The guides walk through the dashboard one task at a time, naming each screen and button as the dashboard shows them, with pictures.

• Everyone: Getting started — signing in with GitHub or your work email, the Terms, the menu on a computer and on a phone, the account menu, switching between your projects and company licences, and Home.
• Maintainers and repository admins: Guide for maintainers — adding a repository, adopting or updating the licence, the README badge, waivers, size, the settings file, and leaving.
• Companies and organisation owners: Guide for companies — signing in with your work email, registering your organisation, its size group, buying and renewing licences, the projects you use, people and roles, receipts, and the public listing.
• Everyone with an account: Your account — your profile, invitations, email addresses, linking GitHub, where you’re signed in, notifications, the Terms, a copy of your data, the activity on your account, and deleting it.
• Contributors: their guide is being written. Until then, Contributors explains the rules.

The pages below explain the rules behind the screens, and the reference for checking records and scripting.

Adopt — for a maintainer

• Adoption guide — prerequisites, the inbound-licence gate, the one file, notice preservation, the fork question, claiming, weight class, the badge.
• Leaving (quit) — the same act reversed, at the same depth: vesting consequences, what the registry shows afterwards, and why there is no penalty.
• PURPOSE.yml reference — the optional manifest, field by field, and the rule that keeps it safe: informational mirrors only, the LICENSE file governs.

Contribute — for a contributor

• Contributors — the copyright position, the sign-off and its bounded delegation, Impact Shares, the materiality gate, the shadow-mode vote, certificates, and the list of things a contributor does not receive.

Comply — for a company or a programme office

• Companies: buying and complying — lanes and scopes, bands, self-certification, how a passed-on share is attributed, renewal and vesting, waivers, the compliance export, and the SBOM note.
• OSPO and legal pack — classification, identifier and scanner guidance, term certainty, the evidence artifacts with their shapes, the procurement pack, and the permitted claim wording.
• Waivers — public and gratis always, who may grant one, the cooling window, revocation, and how to ask.

Verify — for anyone checking a claim

• Verify a certificate offline — the three checks, with WebCrypto and OpenSSL, transparency-log inclusion, and the exhaustive verdict matrix.
• Public API reference — the v0 routes, cache behaviour, the error envelope, rate limits, the propagation bound, and the sandbox.

Current stage and source documents

Purpose Source License 1.0 was published on 2026-10-01. Licence credentials are sold through our online reseller Paddle. Checkout opens at launch; no payment is taken before then. The public registry opens with the first registered projects; waivers come with the platform’s claim process. Registry, ledger and certificate records labelled sample are examples, not evidence of real transfers. Published API contracts describe the public artifact interface; platform account actions use the platform’s separate workflows and terms.

Read our commitments and current stage, the statutes and the canonical licence for the documents behind these guides.