For contributors
Same PR. Bigger footprint.
Same PR. Bigger footprint. Your merged work leaves a verifiable impact record — and a vote on where the money goes.
Impact without donating. A developer with no money to give can still direct real value to public-benefit causes across a career, because their skill created the economic value. Purpose Source makes contribution — not wealth — the currency of philanthropy.
What you keep
Your workflow
Fork, branch, pull request, review, merge. Nothing in the contribution path changes, and nothing asks you to register anywhere before your work can land.
Your copyright
No copyright assignment, ever — contributors keep their copyright. The designed default is a one-line sign-off; the instrument is confirmed by counsel. Under the licence's per-licensor drafting, you are a licensor of your own contribution, and the licence's condition is already in your grant.
Your history and reputation
Public git history, public attribution, portfolio value — unchanged. Purpose Source is built on top of the contribution identity your host already records, as a richer layer, never a new identity from scratch.
What the sign-off says, in plain terms: that you have the right to submit the work; that you accept the steward roles the licence defines; and that a materially consistent later version of the licence may apply to your contribution — bounded by an immutable core no later version can touch: the free-tier threshold may only widen, the four-year conversion may only shorten, the charity destination and the no-private-profit rule stay, the steward remains a registrar and never a licensor, and administrators keep their waiver power. Anything outside that core needs your fresh consent or applies only to future contributions.
Impact Shares, explained
A published algorithm
Each project's routed flow is attributed across its contributors by a published points algorithm, versioned and labelled on every display, with its source on the algorithms page. The first version is provisional and says so; a later version adds clone-based attribution with its anti-gaming guards. Shares nobody has claimed route by the project's default categories, in aggregate.
A materiality gate
Points and percentiles are always shown. A currency figure is shown only above a published floor. Below it, the number is real but too small to mean what a reader would take it to mean, and a page that shows it anyway is practising precision-shaming, not transparency.
Directing, never receiving
No cash, no vouchers, no gift cards, no bounties, no convertible perks — ever. You direct where the project's flow goes; you never hold any of it. Certificates, badges and dashboards carry no market value, deliberately.
Why the red line is a red line
A mechanism that paid contributors would turn every merge decision into a payment decision and make the Association a payroll rather than a registry. It would also create income, social-security and employment questions for you in your own country, and would put the Association's public-benefit character at risk. The line protects you as much as it protects the model.
A vote on where the money goes
Contributors choose among seven verified cause categories: health, education, poverty relief, humanitarian aid, environment, animal welfare, research. Your choice is advisory — the Association keeps final discretion over allocation, which is the same property the Swiss tax authorities require of a public-benefit organisation routing funds abroad. The product design and the tax design coincide on purpose, and neither will drift from the other.
Shadow mode first. Votes are recorded and displayed from the start, but
route real money only after two conditions both hold: at least one quarter of reviewed
shadow data, and an allocation algorithm that has passed a published fairness
qualification. Every project's routing mode is visible as one of
project_default, shadow or contributor_active,
so you can always see whether your vote is being counted or being learned from.
What you are voting on is a category, never a named recipient. The category funds and the intermediary that delivers them are described on the causes page.
Certificates you — and anyone — can verify
A contributor certificate is a deterministic document carrying a signed payload (ES256) and a QR code that resolves to this site's verification page. The page checks the signature in the reader's own browser against the published key set and confirms the certificate appears in the public transparency log; it never simply takes our word. The fixed rule: verify only at purposesource.org/verify.
The professional value is stated as a design intent, not a result: we built this to be the most meaningful line a contribution can add to your record — technical reputation, community reputation, and a verifiable public-benefit footprint in one sentence you can put on a profile. Whether it works is a question for people who have used it, after launch, and not a claim we make today.
What an impact card is built to show
A mock-up. No certificate with these values exists, no ledger row backs them, and the figures are sample figures chosen to show the shape of the display and its gate.
Illustrative — sample figures, not a ledger
Contributor impact card
sample
routing mode: shadow (sample) · certificate: cert_sample_… ·
verify only at purposesource.org/verify
The wording such a card is built to support, illustratively: "I contributed to five Purpose Source projects used by 140 organisations; my contributions helped direct CHF 3,400 to public-benefit causes (illustrative)." The contributor did not donate anything — they created software, and the software's usefulness created the impact.
Before you contribute: your employer
We state this here rather than letting a contributor discover it from a policy page after their pull request is open. It is a real cost, priced in, and we would rather lose a contribution honestly than win it by pretending the cost does not exist.
Everything about you is opt-in
- Your contributions are attributed by the algorithm whether or not you claim a profile; nothing is displayed about you by name until you claim it.
- The only invitation to claim is passive — a line in the project's badge kit and its repository. No emails, no bots, no mentions.
- Email, if you want it, is double opt-in; certificates are yours to download or ignore.
- No leaderboards, no rankings, no per-person currency figure below the published floor — on any page, ever. The impact page explains why.
Where next
Your code can help someone who will never clone your repository. Your contribution can matter to someone who has never opened GitHub.
Read the contributor guide Verify a certificate Find a project