Licence versions / PurposeSource-1.0-draft / annotated

PurposeSource-1.0-draft — annotated

Non-operative companion — the licence text governs. Where this page and the licence text differ, the text wins and this page is defective. Nothing here grants, limits, waives, or interprets anything with legal effect.

A licence nobody can read is a licence nobody adopts. This page says, in plain English, what each section of PurposeSource-1.0-draft does — and answers the three questions that decide every review, with a pointer to the clause that does the work instead of a promise that it will be fine.

The three fears

These are the three objections this licence category earns by existing, and each of them is answered by a clause rather than by a reassurance. Every rug-pull in this field was also, at the time, reassuring.

“Will my company be ambushed?”

Short answer: the text contains no mechanism for it, and three that prevent it. There is no audit right, no inspection clause, and no reporting duty anywhere in the licence — and the drafting brief excludes all three permanently, which is recorded as a never-reopen item at what we can never do.

You measure yourself. The threshold is a dual test against your own prior fiscal year — Section 3. Self-certification is one binding, timestamped tick at checkout, outside the licence entirely.
Crossing the line is not a violation. Sixty days of cure from the first day the condition is not satisfied — Section 11. Grow past the threshold and you have two months to hold a credential, not a lawsuit.
Only forward-looking versions are conditioned. The condition attaches to versions published after you were above the threshold — Section 4 — and never to what you already vested under Section 5.
Buying settles the past, to the extent it can be settled. An Entitlement carries amnesty covenants on purchase from the Association and from the project's steward of record. It cannot release other contributors' claims, because nobody can release a claim they do not hold — so the Entitlement terms say exactly that instead of implying a total release.
No enforcement economics point at ambush. Compliance is designed to be answered by a scanner and a public registry: the fee is smaller than the meeting held to discuss it, and litigation in this field is a decade-scale tail risk, not an operating tool. The posture is published, not implied.

What this does not promise: that a court will read the condition the way the drafting intends. That risk is real, untested, and stated on the comparison page rather than hidden here.

“What if the Association disappears?”

Short answer: the licence degrades to permissive terms without anyone's help. Every part of that answer is in the grant, not in a policy document, precisely because a policy needs an organisation to be alive to mean anything.

The lapse backstop. If the Association ceases to exist, or stops issuing Entitlements for twelve consecutive months with no publicly designated successor, the condition lapses for everyone — Section 9.
The conversion keeps running unattended. Each version becomes Apache-2.0 on its own fourth anniversary whether or not anyone administers it — Section 8.
Vested versions are untouched. Section 5 is not conditional on the Association existing; it is a term of each licensor's own grant.
Stopping is pre-planned, not improvised. The kill criteria, the wind-down sequence, and the payer-held-whole guarantee are published as a standing page — kill protocol — and the duty to run it is Art. 12 of the statutes.
The records outlive the organisation. On dissolution the registry, the ledger, the key set, and the transparency log are archived at permanent URLs so every issued certificate still verifies — Art. 22.

“Can this be changed under me?”

Short answer: not for a version you already have, and not in the direction that would hurt you. Versions are immutable, vesting is permanent, and the parts of the design that could be worsened are locked in the statutes so that a future board cannot decide otherwise.

A release keeps the licence it shipped under, forever. A new licence version aims the future; it cannot reach backwards. Section 8 also forbids extending a published version's conversion date.
The immutable core. Where a contributor's sign-off delegates later versions to their existing contributions, that delegation can never narrow the free tier, never lengthen or remove the four-year conversion, never touch the destination of funds or the no-private-profit rule, never make the Association a licensor, and never remove the administrator's gratis waiver power — Art. 11, mirrored in Section 7.
The bars are self-entrenching. A never-reopen article may be amended only to become stricter, and a resolution that first tries to unlock the lock is void — Art. 21.
Prices cannot be changed for you alone. One published, versioned schedule applies to everyone; private terms are forbidden — Art. 9.
Changes are visible. Every version of the licence, the statutes, the schedule, and the legal documents stays published at a permanent URL, and a change publishes with a diff. The development record — drafts, issues, provenance — is public at https://github.com/purposesource/license.

Section by section

Section numbers follow the section map of the text published on this site at /license/PurposeSource-1.0-draft. While the drafting is open, the working draft in the development record numbers its clause skeletons differently; the published text is what these pointers mean.

Plain-English companion to PurposeSource-1.0-draft. Non-operative.

§	Section	In plain English	What a reviewer should notice
1	Definitions	The words the rest of the text uses, including “your organisation”, which is the whole consolidated group — the entity plus everything that controls it, is controlled by it, or is under common control with it. A small subsidiary of a very large parent is measured as the parent.	This is the clause that decides whether you are large. Read it before you read the threshold.
2	Grant of rights	Each contributor grants you, individually, the copyright and patent permissions to use, modify, distribute, self-host, and patch the software. Per licensor: nobody grants rights on anyone else’s behalf, and the Association grants nothing at all because it holds nothing.	The grant is normal. Everything unusual about this licence lives in the condition on it, not in the permissions.
3	The threshold	You are small — and owe nothing, register nothing, and hold no credential — if, for your prior tax year and across the whole group, fewer than 100 people worked for you as employees and contractors AND your total revenue was under the published figure. Both parts. You assess it yourself.	No audit right and no inspection clause exist anywhere in the text, and the drafting brief excludes them permanently. Self-certification happens once, at checkout, outside the licence.
4	The condition on organisations above the threshold	If you are large, the permissions apply while one of four things is true: the use is not for a large organisation’s benefit; the organisation holds a current Entitlement; it holds a Waiver from the project; or it holds a Donation Entitlement recorded on proof of a direct donation. Use outside those limbs is simply outside the grant.	There is no promise to pay anybody in this text. It is a scope limit, not a payment covenant — which is also why the Association is never a party to it.
5	Per-version vesting	A version is yours permanently if its publication date falls on or before the end of your paid term. That is the entire formula. At activation it covers the back catalogue plus everything published during the term; renewing extends the end date.	Nothing takes a vested version away: not project exit, not delisting, not a revoked waiver, not the Association failing. This is the clause that makes the licence buyable.
6	Waivers	A repository’s administrator may excuse a named organisation from the condition, for that repository, on any terms or none. Waivers are public, gratis, and revocable going forward only, and they vest under Section 5 with “term end” = revocation or expiry.	Public, always. An invisible waiver would make coverage unanswerable and side deals possible; selling one is a delisting offence under the statutes.
7	Contribution	Contributions arrive under this licence — inbound equals outbound. No copyright assignment, ever: contributors keep their copyright. The designed default instrument is a one-line sign-off; its final form is confirmed by counsel.	The sign-off carries a bounded delegation to later, materially consistent versions, and an enumerated immutable core it can never reach. That core is Art. 11 of the statutes.
8	Automatic conversion to Apache-2.0	Every version becomes available under the Apache License, Version 2.0 on the fourth anniversary of its own publication. Unconditional, licence-wide, not a per-project setting, and not extendable for a version already published.	Each version has its own clock. Your worst case as an adopter is “pin it and wait”, and that worst case is in the grant rather than in a blog post.
9	Steward-lapse backstop	If the Association ceases to exist, or stops issuing Entitlements for twelve consecutive months with no publicly designated successor, the condition lapses and the licence continues on permissive terms — for everyone.	This is the answer to “what if they disappear”, written into the grant so that it does not depend on anyone being around to honour it.
10	Notices, marks, and the canonical token	Keep the licence text and every notice you received with the software, including notices that arrived with code under earlier terms. You may call software “licensed under the Purpose Source License” only if the text you ship is the canonical text, unchanged.	Adopting never deletes an inbound licence text. And no terms addressed to a repository administrator ever appear in this file — a licence binds users.
11	Termination and cure	If the condition stops being satisfied, you have 60 days. Satisfy any limb within that window and your permissions continue uninterrupted. Miss it and permissions end — except for versions already vested, which continue permanently.	Growing past the threshold on a Tuesday does not make you an infringer on the Wednesday. That is the point of the window.
12	Disclaimers and limitation of liability	The software comes with no warranty, and no licensor takes liability, as far as the law allows. Nothing excluded that cannot lawfully be excluded.	Standard for this licence family. Note what is NOT here: a credential is expressly not a warranty that the code is free of third-party rights — that statement belongs in the Entitlement terms.
13	Governing law and forum	How disputes about the licence itself are decided.	Open in the drafting: staying silent keeps the text jurisdiction-neutral and leaves each licensor’s own law to apply; naming Swiss law centralises interpretation but reads like a vendor licence. The choice has adoption consequences and is recorded as undecided rather than quietly settled.

What this licence does not require

These are properties of the drafting above, restated because they are the first three things every corporate reviewer checks — not additional promises:

No obligation on your own software. The condition attaches to the covered software and travels no further — nothing about what you write, link, host, or ship alongside it.
No disclosure. No source, architecture, deployment, or customer list.
No network clause. Offering the software's functionality over a network triggers nothing, and there is no source-offer duty of any kind.
No share-alike. Your modifications are yours, on terms you choose, subject only to the condition and the notice duty.
No audit right and no reporting duty. File nothing, register nothing, notify nobody.

The classification, plainly

This is not an open source licence. The condition on large organisations is not permitted by the Open Source Definition, and the licence is not OSI-approved. Open source is this category's predecessor, named as such and never claimed as a description of it. If your policy is "OSI-approved licences only", then for new releases the correct answer is denied, and the four-year conversion — which delivers plain Apache-2.0, an OSI-approved open source licence — is the mechanism that changes that answer over time rather than an argument against your policy. The unvarnished version, including the costs, is on the comparison page and in the OSPO and legal pack.

How to check that this page is honest

Read the licence text yourself at /license/PurposeSource-1.0-draft, or fetch the byte-exact file at /license/PurposeSource-1.0-draft.txt.
Hash it: the published SHA-256 is be9de8eaaa29977edcd4d19c6a17f7a81c3c08a62f4a00ade7fe26f4707639f2, and the build fails if the served bytes and that pin ever disagree.
Compare this companion against the text clause by clause, and report a divergence to the development record. A defective annotation is a bug with an issue, not an interpretation.