What we can never do

Each line below is a structural bar, not a promise of good behaviour. A promise can be revised by a future board; these are written into the statutes as never-reopen articles, or into the licence text itself, and Art. 21 of the statutes forbids amending a never-reopen article except to make it stricter. Changes to this page publish with a visible diff.

We can never…	Bound by
Become a licensor, sublicensor, or rights-holder in any adopting project’s code	Statutes Art. 4 · Licence, definitions and Section 2 (grant is per licensor)
Require a copyright assignment from a contributor — contributors keep their copyright	Statutes Art. 4 · Licence, Section 7 (contribution)
Distribute private profit to members, officers, founders, or staff	Statutes Art. 5 — no distributable private profit, structurally
Pay routed funds to the Association, a board member, a member, or a repository owner	Statutes Art. 5 — recipient bar
Pay contributors for contributions, in money or anything of monetary value	Statutes Art. 5 · Contributors
Deduct uncapped operating costs from proceeds	Statutes Art. 6 — the cap may only be lowered
Route funds to a recipient outside the seven published, vetted categories	Statutes Art. 7 — curated recipients
Sell a waiver, broker an exemption, or let a repository administrator sell one	Statutes Art. 8 · Licence, Section 6 — gratis, public waivers; selling one is a delisting offence
Set a price privately, per customer	Statutes Art. 9 — one published, versioned schedule
Edit or delete a published ledger row	Statutes Art. 10 — append-only ledger, hash chain
Narrow the free-tier threshold in a successor licence version applied to existing contributions	Statutes Art. 11 · contributor instrument, immutable core item 1
Lengthen or remove the four-year conversion to Apache-2.0 for existing contributions	Statutes Art. 11 · Licence, Section 8 · immutable core item 2
Withdraw a version a payer has already vested	Licence, Section 5 — per-version vesting is permanent
Leave adopters stranded if the Association fails	Licence, Section 9 — steward-lapse backstop; Statutes Art. 12
Continue past the pre-registered kill criteria without stopping	Statutes Art. 12 · kill protocol
Keep remaining funds on dissolution, or pass them to members	Statutes Art. 22 — dissolution to tax-exempt public benefit
Add an audit right, an inspection clause, or a reporting duty to the licence	Licence, Section 3 — self-certification only; the drafting brief excludes them permanently
Print a verification address other than the one on the verification page	Keys — the fixed wording

How to read the clause pointers

Statutes articles link to the English working text of Statutes v1 on this site; the German original prevails once published, and the article numbering is the same in both. Licence section numbers refer to the section map of the published 1.0 draft text; the annotated companion explains each in plain English and is non-operative. Where a row names both, the statutes bind the Association and the licence binds everyone.