Contributors

Same pull request. The workflow does not change, the review does not change, and your copyright does not move.

What is added is a record: a merged contribution earns an attributed Impact Share under a published, versioned algorithm, an advisory vote on which cause categories the project’s routed funds go to, and a signed certificate you can verify yourself. What is not added is money, in any form, to you — and that is a structural bar, not a policy.

The copyright position

No copyright assignment, ever — contributors keep their copyright. That is the permanent public promise, and it is the one this movement will be held to.

Contributions are licensed inbound = outbound: under the project’s own licence, to the project’s users, with no separate grant to the Association.
The licence is drafted per licensor — “each licensor grants you…” — so you license your own part and nobody licenses on your behalf. A side effect worth knowing: a large organisation using the project outside the licence’s condition is outside your grant too, and the claim is yours, not the Association’s.
The Association can never be a licensor, sublicensor, or rightsholder in any project’s code, and can never ask you to assign copyright. Both bars are never-reopen articles (Art. 4, and what we can never do).

The contribution instrument

The designed default is a one-line sign-off in the commit trailer — the same ceremony as a developer-certificate-of-origin sign-off:

Signed-off-by: Your Name <you@example.invalid>

The final form of the instrument is confirmed by counsel, so this page describes it as the designed default rather than promising the ceremony. What the sign-off is designed to assert:

that you have the right to submit the contribution;
that you accept the steward roles the licence defines — that a recorded Entitlement or Waiver satisfies the licence’s condition for every licensor’s grant, including yours; and
a bounded forward delegation: that later versions of the licence, if they are materially consistent with this one, may apply to your existing contributions.

That third point is the one that deserves scrutiny, so its limits are published rather than buried. The delegation can never reach the immutable core (Art. 11): the free-tier threshold may only widen; the four-year conversion may only shorten; the destination of funds and the no-private-profit rule cannot be touched; the Association cannot become a licensor; the administrator’s gratis waiver power cannot be removed. A change touching any of those needs your fresh consent or applies to future contributions only. Non-material corrections and legally required cures apply automatically.

Without a delegation of that kind, a new licence version could not be applied to existing contributions at all without per-contributor consent — which is a real constraint, honestly described, rather than “the licence is frozen”.

Impact Shares

An Impact Share is an attributed share of a project’s routed funds that you direct — never receive.

What it is computed from. The public contribution record of the canonical repository, by the published algorithm version in force. PP-v0, the founding-cohort algorithm, is deliberately coarse: merged pull requests and commits, weighted by a published scheme, with vendored, generated, and bot contributions excluded. PP-v1 — clone-based attribution over the actual code, with the full anti-gaming guard set — activates only after PP-v0 has run for a reviewed quarter and the fairness review is published.
What it shows. Points and a percentile band, always. A currency figure only above a published materiality floor; below it, points and percentile only.
What it never shows. A leaderboard. A cross-contributor money ranking. Anything that turns a shared codebase into a scoreboard. The materiality gate exists because a figure of “a few cents” attached to a person’s name is both meaningless and slightly insulting.
Every displayed figure carries the algorithm version that produced it, and each version publishes with the date range it applied to. Versions are never mutated; a change is a new version alongside the old one.
Nothing is displayed yet. The claim flow that lets a contributor appear is a later phase, so at this stage there is no attributed figure anywhere on this site — that is the honest state, not an outage.

Details and the source pointer: algorithms and schedule versions.

The vote, in shadow mode first

Contributors get an advisory vote on which of the seven published categories the project’s routed funds go to: health, education, poverty relief, humanitarian aid, environment, animal welfare, research.

Routing mode	What happens	Status
`project_default`	The project’s own declared categories, or the published fallback split	In force
`shadow`	Contributor votes are recorded and displayed, and route no money	The launch mode
`contributor_active`	Contributor votes route real funds	Only after one reviewed quarter of shadow data and a fairness-qualified allocation algorithm

Shadow mode is not a soft launch for its own sake. It means the first quarter’s votes can be compared against what the algorithm would have done, in public, before anyone’s money moves on the strength of them. The vote is advisory in all modes: the Association keeps the final decision on distribution among the categories (Art. 7) — both a governance choice and a requirement of the tax framework for a Swiss entity routing funds abroad.

Certificates

A contributor certificate is a participation certificate: it names you as you elected to be named — a platform login or a supplied name, never an email address — and states the project, the period, and the categories your share directed.

ES256-signed, logged in the append-only transparency log before delivery. A certificate absent from the log renders as unverified even with a perfect signature.
Verified in one place. The fixed wording is: verify only at purposesource.org/verify. Any artifact offering another verification address is not ours.
Verifiable without us. Fetch the key set, check the signature, check log inclusion — the procedure is verify a certificate offline.
It has no monetary value, deliberately. See below.

What you never receive

This list is the point of the design, not a limitation of it:

No money. No cash, no bank transfer, no invoice you can raise.
No voucher, gift card, credit, bounty, or convertible perk. Anything with resale or exchange value is excluded.
No equity, token, unit, or claim on the Association or on any project.
No entitlement to be paid later. Nothing accrues, vests, or accumulates in your favour.

Why it is built this way, stated plainly:

Structural. Paying contributors is a never-reopen bar (Art. 5). It is not a budgeting decision a future board could revisit.
Legal. A revocable, advisory designation right with nothing of market value attached creates no income, no social-security event, and no employment relationship anywhere. Any convertible perk would re-open all three — and would threaten the Association’s public-benefit status, which is what makes the routing work at all.
Honest about the alternative. If your goal is to be paid for maintenance, this is the wrong instrument and we will say so: a revenue-seeking maintainer is better served by a commercial source-available licence. This design converts a zero counterfactual into public benefit; it never diverts maintainer income, because there was none to divert.

What contributing does cost you

Owned openly, because a page that lists only benefits is a sales page:

Some employers and programme offices bar contributions to licences that are not OSI-approved. That is a real cost, it is not zero, and we do not claim it is. The four-year conversion means even the strictest shop can consume, pin, and eventually contribute to the converted versions.
Package registries and distributions will not ship a conditionally licensed project. If the project you contribute to needs to be a widely redistributed library, this licence is the wrong choice for it.
Scanner friction until an SPDX identifier is listed: expect “unknown licence” flags in the meantime. The OSPO and legal pack says how to handle them.

Adoption guide — what a maintainer does, and what it changes for you
Verify a certificate offline — check your own certificate without trusting this site
Algorithms and schedule versions — the attribution algorithm and its versions
What we can never do — including paying contributors
Privacy notice — attribution data, the opt-in, and the exclusion list