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Licence

The Purpose Source License

One canonical text with zero parameters. Every adopting repository ships the identical file, which is why a programme office reviews this category once rather than once per project.

Draft — not counsel-issued

No version of this licence has been issued by counsel yet. What is published below is a structural draft: it grants nothing, waives nothing, and imposes nothing. Do not commit it to a repository. The canonical text arrives from counsel drafting; this site then vendors it byte-exactly and pins its hash, so the text you read here can be proved identical to the text in the licence repository.

Licence versions. Slugs are permanent: a published version URL never moves.

Version Published Converts to Apache-2.0 SPDX Plain English Text
PurposeSource-1.0-draft draft not published set on publication not requested yet annotated .txt · .json

Conversion date: the fourth anniversary of each version's first publication. It is a property of the version, not of a project or a purchase, and it is fixed in the licence text rather than in a policy. A draft carries neither date, and the table says so rather than guessing: a draft grants nothing, so there is no release for a conversion clock to run from. Both dates are set on the day counsel issues the text and it publishes as a version. The development record — drafts, issues, and counsel provenance — is public at github.com/purposesource/license.

How versions behave

  • A published version never changes. Its page, its byte-exact text endpoint, and its metadata endpoint stay at their URLs permanently.
  • Each version converts on its own fourth anniversary, not on a single global date. The conversion is unconditional and survives the disappearance of the steward.
  • A release keeps the licence it shipped under, forever. Adopting a new version aims the future; it cannot reach backwards.
  • Every version has a plain-English companion. The annotated page explains each section and answers the three questions every review asks — ambush, disappearance, change — with a clause pointer for each. It is non-operative: where it and the text differ, the text governs.

The development record — drafts, issues, and counsel provenance — is public in the licence repository.