Terms of use

These terms govern your use of purposesource.org and the public edge API. They are not the software licence — that is the Purpose Source License, which binds users of adopting projects and never mentions this site — and they are not the Entitlement terms a purchaser accepts at checkout, which govern each purchase (section 11). Three documents, three relationships, deliberately kept apart.

1. What this site is

A publisher of documents and published artifacts, operated by the Purpose Source Association (the imprint): the licence text, the registry, the fee schedule, the allocation ledger, certificate status records, the key set, the transparency log, and the documentation. Everything served here is a static file or a cached copy of a published artifact. The Association is registrar and witness for the Purpose Source category — never a licensor of code it registers for others; where the Association itself owns a registered project, that ownership is stated wherever the project appears and the project receives no treatment unavailable to any other.

2. No advice; what governs

Nothing on this site is legal, tax, or financial advice. The plain-English companions to the licence, the documentation, and the frequently asked questions are explanations; they are non-operative. Where an explanation and an operative text differ — the licence text, the statutes, the Entitlement terms — the operative text governs and the explanation is defective. Comparative statements about tax treatment are qualified statements about typical treatment, never guarantees; obtain your own advice.

3. Accuracy and freshness

Published artifacts are eventually consistent by design: the stated propagation bound for coverage-relevant state is five minutes worldwide, and no page promises real time. Pages state when their data was computed. A figure labelled illustrative is illustrative: it describes a mechanism or a schedule, not a recorded transaction. No impact figure exists on this site before a disbursed ledger row exists.

4. Registry claims — summary of the claim terms

Adoption needs no relationship with the Association: a project adopts the licence by committing one file, and the licence is fully operative without a listing. A registered repository is listed, with its own page and badge, whether or not anyone claims it. A claim adds the administrators’ own powers in the registry, among them the power to grant waivers, and it is the one place terms addressed to a repository administrator live. The claim flow opens in a later phase; when it does, its terms will provide in substance:

• Attestation. The claimant attests that they hold administrative control of the repository and represent sufficient authority to adopt the licence for it. Copyright stays with the rightsholders; the claim transfers no rights to anyone.
• Waivers are repository-scoped, public, gratis, and revocable prospectively only. Selling or brokering a waiver costs the persons responsible their registry powers, and the project its listing where its administration as a whole is responsible or leaves a serious breach unremedied (statutes Art. 10 para. 5).
• Delisting and appeal. Grounds for delisting are published; a delisted repository keeps a neutral tombstone at its URL, and the appeal outcome is recorded.
• No admin-side terms in the LICENSE file, ever. A licence binds users; the relationship between an administrator and the Association is the claim terms, and only there.

5. Certificates, publicity and official marks

Our official certificates can be checked at purposesource.org/verify. An official coverage badge should link to its verification record and display its current status.

You may describe your participation in your own words, in any language, without prior approval. When you share or cite a contributor certificate we issued to you, use the words of the claim-language kit it names and keep to its rules; what you say about your work in your own words, without the certificate, stays yours. You are welcome to name Purpose Source, link to our website and official social profiles, and use our official logos and badges under the publicity and brand-use policy. The policy applies to our official marks, not to your independent wording. You remain responsible for your own statements and permissions for other organisations’ material.

6. Acceptable use and the public API

Read it, quote it, script against the documented endpoints within the published rate limits, and use conditional requests. Do not scrape certificate identifiers, enumerate organisations through the coverage surface, or bypass the challenge on the forms. A response carrying 429 and Retry-After means exactly that.

7. Intellectual property

The site’s code is published under Apache-2.0 and its brand pages under CC BY-ND, as stated in the repository. The canonical licence text may be copied verbatim; the licence’s name is conditioned on the text being unchanged. “Purpose Source” and the Association’s name are its marks; permission to use them is granted by the publicity and brand-use policy.

8. Availability and liability

Best effort. There is no service-level commitment while the operating team is this small, and none is printed to look larger. No public status page is published yet: the Trust Center states what is monitored today and names the act that produces the page, and the incident history moves there on the day it exists. To the extent the law allows, the Association is not liable for loss arising from use of this site or reliance on an explanation on it; nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and nothing here limits the Association’s obligations under the Entitlement terms or the statutes.

9. Governing law and forum

Swiss law; the courts at the Association’s seat in the canton of Aargau, without prejudice to mandatory consumer protections in your jurisdiction.

10. Changes

Until their first public use, this first version is corrected in place. After that, when these terms change, the new version is published on this site, and every version, this one included, stays permanently readable at its own numbered address; this one’s is /legal/terms/v1.

11. Purchases

Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com. Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Paddle provides all customer service inquiries and handles returns.

What is sold is the Entitlement: the annual commercial-use licence credential described on the pricing page, created and issued by the Purpose Source Association (address in the imprint). Purchases are sold through Paddle (Paddle.com Market Ltd; Paddle.com Inc. for buyers in the United States; Paddle.com (Canada) Ltd. for buyers in Canada), our merchant of record. The Entitlement terms govern what the Association records, issues and promises; every purchase is also subject to Paddle’s Buyer Terms. Prices are in US dollars per year, before tax: Paddle adds any sales tax or VAT due in the buyer’s country at checkout. Refunds: see the refund policy. Buyer support: billing@purposesource.org (other routes on the contact page), or Paddle at paddle.net.

12. Your contributor page

If you sign in with GitHub, you can build a contributor page in the account dashboard (app.purposesource.org) and publish it at purposesource.org. This section applies to that page, beside the rest of these terms; the privacy notice (section 8) says what we do with the data on it.

• Who may publish. You may publish a page only if you are 16 or older, and only while it shows something Purpose Source can vouch for: a repository that credits you, one of your certificates, or a registered repository where you adopted the licence.
• Your content stays yours, and you answer for it. What you put on the page (your display name, pronouns and bio, your own words about Purpose Source if you write some, the links you add, and any picture or cover you upload) is your content, and you keep every right in it. You confirm that you may publish it, and that a picture or cover you upload is yours to use and shows nothing you may not show.
• What is not allowed. Nothing unlawful. Nothing that infringes another person’s rights, such as their copyright, their trademarks, their privacy or their image. No pretending to be another person, Purpose Source, its stewards or its staff, and no wording that claims an official status or a check that Purpose Source did not make. No link that misleads, or that leads to harmful software, to a phishing page or to a scam. Nothing that harasses, threatens or exposes another person, nothing sexually explicit, and nothing that glorifies or incites violence. No ads or spam: the page is about your contributions.
• What we may refuse or hide. The editor refuses names, links, files and wording that our published rules do not accept, and a published page leaves out an item those rules no longer accept. The editor’s checks are automatic; a steward decides any hide or pause. We may hide your page when it breaks these terms, when a report shows that it is probably unlawful, or when the law requires it; when in doubt, we hide first and decide after. A hide by us works like your own: it deletes the page’s public files and the pictures and covers you uploaded. We tell you why in the dashboard, and you may change the page and publish it again; after a second hide by us, or when a steward pauses publishing for your account, publishing stays paused until a steward lifts the pause. A steward reviews a refusal, a hide or a pause when you ask, at legal@purposesource.org.
• Reports. Anyone may report a page through its “Report this page” link or by writing to legal@purposesource.org. We aim to answer within five business days, and we escalate a threat to someone’s life or safety at once.
• No endorsement. Every page carries the same fixed footer: it is a contributor’s own page, and Purpose Source checks the certificates and the repository facts on it, not the owner’s words or links. Publishing a page does not make what it says, or the services it links to, ours. Sponsorship links go to other services: Purpose Source takes no part in those payments, and they are not Purpose Fees or donations to the listed charities.
• The licence you give us. So that we can run the page, you give the Purpose Source Association a free, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to store, copy, re-encode (resize, crop and convert a picture, which removes its metadata), host and show your content as your page, its private preview, its printed form and its card, and to keep it in the record of what you published. The licence to show it ends when you hide or delete the page; the licence to keep it ends when the privacy notice says the record goes. Copies others have already made are outside our reach.
• Stopping. You can hide or delete your page at any time, without giving a reason.