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Terms of use

In force · under counsel review

Issued by the Purpose Source Association and effective from 2026-09-02. Counsel review is ongoing in the founding phase; if it requires a change, a new version publishes at a new URL and this one stays readable here, unchanged.

version
v1
effective from
2026-09-02
permalink
/legal/terms/v1
issuer
Purpose Source Association

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. 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 any project’s code.

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 claim unlocks the verified listing, the badge, and 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 is a delisting offence.
  • 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 and claims about them

  • Certificates are verified in one place. The fixed wording is: verify only at purposesource.org/verify. Do not offer any other verification address, and treat any artifact that does as not ours.
  • A certificate may be described publicly only within its claim-language kit: the permitted pattern names the Entitlement held, the Purpose Fee amount, the period, and the categories, and excludes generic social-impact framing. The kit and its pattern are in the OSPO and legal pack; the binding statement is printed on the certificate itself.
  • Do not misrepresent a certificate’s status, scope, period, or type; do not present a sandbox artifact as a production credential; do not present a licence-status certificate (waiver, under-threshold) as a supporter or impact certificate.

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; nothing here grants a right in them beyond factual description.

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; the status page linked from the footer carries the incident history. 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

These terms are versioned at permanent URLs. A new version is a new URL; this one stays readable at this address forever.

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