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Adopt

For repository administrators

Activate your repo.

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.

Your code was already valuable. Purpose Source activates that value — without a fundraiser, without a foundation, and without a single change to how your community works. Don't let useful code stop at being useful.

How adoption works Read the licence Browse the registry

What changes, and what doesn't

The honest answer to "what happens to my community?" is a long list of things that stay identical and a short list of things that change. Both lists are below, in full.

Everything you keep

  • Public source code, readable by anyone; anyone can inspect and learn from it.
  • Fork and clone; modify and adapt.
  • Issues, discussions and pull requests exactly as before — no copyright assignment, ever; contributors keep their copyright, with a one-line sign-off as the designed default (instrument confirmed by counsel).
  • Free for individuals, students and hobbyists — no account, no registration.
  • Free for non-profits and organisations below the published threshold — functionally permissive below it, with a 60-day cure window above it.
  • No charge to contribute.
  • Security auditability — inspect, scan, verify builds.
  • No vendor lock-in — self-patch, self-build, self-host; vested versions stay usable forever.
  • Contributor reputation — public git history, portfolio value.
  • You control the roadmap, the merges and the releases.
  • One committed file to adopt, one committed file to leave.
  • Old releases keep the licence they shipped under, forever — nothing is ever pulled back.
  • Abandonment insurance — the code survives you, and a steward-lapse backstop turns the licence permissive if we disappear.
  • Education, research and reference value.
  • Every version becomes plain Apache-2.0 four years after its release, in the licence text.

What changes

  • Organisations above the published threshold need a current Entitlement — or a waiver you grant — to use new releases.
  • Contributions arrive under the Purpose Source License from the adoption commit onward; releases already published are untouched.
  • Your repository can appear in the public registry, with a badge, once you claim the listing.
  • The project accumulates a public, ledger-backed record of Purpose Fees routed to the category funds — a number stars and downloads cannot express.
  • One published, versioned schedule applies to everyone. You never set prices.
  • Free commercial use by any organisation regardless of size — intentionally different: that is the point.

Row by row, with the places where the predecessor keeps a real edge: the honest comparison.

In one paragraph

Everything you actually do stays the same: public source, forks, pull requests, free for individuals, non-profits and companies below the threshold — no copyright assignment, ever: contributors keep their copyright, with a one-line sign-off as the designed default (instrument confirmed by counsel); adoption is one committed LICENSE file. And every version becomes plain Apache-2.0 four years after release, guaranteed in the licence text. This is not open source, and we say so proudly.

How adoption works — three steps, two of them optional

Adoption is complete after step one. Nothing below asks you for an account before your licence is in force, and nothing is gated on speaking to us.

  1. Commit the LICENSE file

    The canonical Purpose Source License text, byte-exact, with its single notice line. Complete on merge. No account, no registration, no handover, no permission from us. Do not reflow it, prefix it, or parameterise it: one canonical text with zero variants is why a programme office reviews this category once rather than once per project.

    The text published today is a marked draft under counsel review and grants nothing — adopt from the counsel-issued version, announced on the licence page.

  2. Optionally add PURPOSE.yml

    An operational manifest, and the normal case is not to have one. It carries attribution overrides, default cause categories for unclaimed Impact Shares, a weight class request and display metadata. It carries no legal designation: any licence or licensor field in it is an informational mirror, and the LICENSE file governs. Defaults apply when it is absent, and a repository without one is fully and equally adopted.

  3. Optionally claim the listing

    Sign in with GitHub (minimal scope); the platform verifies through the API that you hold administrative permission on the repository; you accept the platform terms once — the only place terms addressed to you as an administrator ever live, never in the licence file, never in a pull-request template. The repository moves from "detected adopter" (an aggregate-only statistic) to a verified listing with a badge, and you gain the waiver and weight-class powers below.

    The claim carries one representation: that you hold administrative control of the canonical repository and sufficient authority to adopt the licence there. Copyright stays with its rightsholders throughout — the claim transfers nothing.

The inbound-licence gate

Run this check first. It is the one step that can make adoption impossible rather than merely inconvenient, and the adoption wizard gates on it.

Permissive inbound (MIT, BSD, Apache-2.0)

You can convert future releases by commit, without asking each contributor — not because contributors implicitly agreed to anything, but because permissive licences grant sublicensing: anyone may redistribute that code within a work under different terms, provided the original notices are preserved.

Your duties: keep the old licence text as a third-party notice for the pre-existing code (the tooling adds the new LICENSE and preserves the old one — it never deletes), and understand that pre-existing fragments remain extractable under their original terms by anyone diligent enough to do it.

Copyleft inbound (GPL, LGPL, MPL)

Conversion requires every contributor's consent, or an existing agreement that already permits it. The wizard offers two paths and no third: the per-contributor consent engine — git-history analysis, per-contributor consent tracking, a public tracking issue, approval by each contributor's own sign-in, and a public progress state — or decline.

The consent engine is also offered as an optional goodwill mode to permissive repositories with large contributor bases: legally unnecessary, communally wise.

Fork risk, honestly

Everything already published under a permissive licence stays under it forever. The conversion captures the future stream — maintenance, security fixes, compatibility with a platform that keeps moving — which is where the value lives and the whole of the thesis.

The counterweight is real: the same permissive grant that lets you convert lets anyone fork the last permissive version and carry it on. Empirically that fork materialises for projects with heavy corporate gravity, and almost never for small and mid-sized ones. The adoption guide carries a per-project risk assessment; the choice is yours, and the page will not make it for you.

The software does not need to be rewritten. The community does not need to start again. Everything you already gave stays given — you're not monetising your past; you're aiming your future.

Waivers: your power, gratis and public

The licence vests in the Project Steward — you, as the administrator of the canonical repository — the power to excuse a named organisation from the Purpose Condition for your repository. The Association records it and witnesses it; you grant it.

  • Public, always. Every waiver is recorded in the public waiver registry. A private exemption would make coverage unanswerable and would be exactly the side-deal this structure exists to prevent.
  • Gratis, always. Selling an exemption is a delisting offence. Waived organisations receive a licence-status certificate only — never a supporter or impact certificate, because they funded nothing.
  • Repository-scoped, grantable and revocable by any verified administrator, with every co-administrator notified and one shared audit log. Disputes between co-administrators are your project's governance; the platform records outcomes and never arbitrates.
  • Revocation is prospective. Versions published on or before the revocation stay usable by the beneficiary permanently, by the same vesting formula that protects payers.
  • A 72-hour cooling window. A waiver covers the beneficiary immediately, but permanent vesting attaches only when the window closes; a revocation inside it voids the waiver from the start. Grants require a step-up re-authentication, and multi-admin repositories may opt into two-administrator approval — so a compromised account cannot mint permanent rights in the minutes before anyone notices.
  • Unclaimed repositories have no waivers. Waiving requires the two-minute claim: one source of truth, one verification answer.

Weight class — the one dial you have

You never set prices. The Association alone writes the numbers, in one published, versioned schedule, and a request for bespoke pricing is answered by pointing at governance — propose a schedule change for everyone — never by a private deal.

What you may select is a repository weight class from a published menu — Standard or Major — with fixed multipliers, published criteria, and review by the Association. That is the whole of your pricing power, on purpose: an administrator who wants real pricing power wants dual licensing for their own revenue, which is a legitimate product and a different one. It lives with BUSL and FSL, and the boundary stays sharp.

Quitting, at documentation parity

Change the licence file back. That is the whole exit — one committed file, exactly as adoption was. The registry follows the repository, so the listing updates on the next build and the badge goes neutral rather than continuing to assert registration. Past ledger rows stand; they record what happened.

Vested coverage is unaffected. Every payer keeps every version whose publication date falls on or before the end of their paid term, permanently. Your exit cannot strip a payer mid-deployment, and that is deliberate: it is the clause that makes the licence buyable at all. No notification duty, no exit interview, no penalty.

How to leave, step by step →

The honest costs

Stated here rather than discovered by your contributors. We would rather lose a maintainer honestly than win one with "no community costs".

  • Some employers will bar contributions. Open source programme offices that permit only OSI-approved licences will treat your project as they treat every BUSL or FSL project. The four-year Apache-2.0 conversion lets even the strictest shop consume, pin, and eventually contribute to older versions — but for new releases the cost is real and we do not claim it is zero.
  • Debian and the other distributions will not ship it. Package-registry and distribution inclusion is a library concern, and this licence is explicitly not for libraries; four-year-old versions qualify normally.
  • It is not for libraries. A product a company deliberately adopts is the design target. A dependency deep in a tree, pulled in by a scanner nobody reads, is not — and our own ecosystem repositories stay MIT or Apache for exactly that reason.
  • Scanners will flag it for a while. An SPDX identifier is requested at launch; until listing, expect "unknown licence" flags from compliance tooling. The machine-readable entitlement and the OSPO pack are the bridge, not a cure.
  • A steward is a risk we added. The lapse backstop, the independent-majority board, the append-only ledger and the published kill protocol bound it; they do not remove it.

Each of these has a row in part (c) of the comparison, with the answer we can actually give.

Where next

Adoption needs no permission and no conversation. If you want one anyway — about your inbound licences, your fork risk, or your weight class — write to us.

Read the adoption guide Browse the registry The licence text