This Covenant articulates the values and expectations of the Palimpsest community. It is not a license — it carries no legal obligations. It is a statement of shared norms that projects adopting the Palimpsest-MPL License are encouraged to follow.
Like the Contributor Covenant for codes of conduct, this document exists separately from the license to provide ethical guidance without compromising legal clarity.
Every line of code carries the effort of someone who wrote it. We preserve attribution not because a license requires it, but because erasing someone's contribution erases their work. Credit where credit is due, always.
Software carries meaning beyond its function. A tool built for protest has different weight than one built for commerce. We encourage preserving the narrative context of creative works — the why, not just the what.
When code is processed by AI training pipelines, content aggregators, or automated transformation tools, we expect transparency about that use. Not as a restriction, but as a norm: if you use someone's work to train a model, say so.
We encourage contributors to sign their work cryptographically. Not because we distrust each other, but because timestamped, signed attribution creates a permanent record that no one can dispute. Your work is yours, provably.
We welcome contributions from all people regardless of background, identity, experience level, or geography. We recognise that the global open source community includes people for whom English is not a first language, who work in different legal jurisdictions, and who bring different cultural contexts to their work.
We encourage projects to consider the environmental and social sustainability of their software. This includes energy efficiency, accessibility, and long-term maintainability.
To adopt this Covenant, add the following to your project's README:
This project follows the [Palimpsest Community Covenant](https://github.com/hyperpolymath/palimpsest-license/blob/main/PALIMPSEST-COVENANT.md).This Covenant is enforced socially, not legally. Projects may choose to reference it in their CONTRIBUTING guidelines, codes of conduct, or community documentation. Violations are addressed through community discussion, not litigation.
This Covenant is versioned independently of the Palimpsest-MPL License. The current version is 1.0. Future versions will be published by the Palimpsest Stewardship Council.
This Covenant was inspired by the Contributor Covenant, the Hippocratic License discussion, and the broader conversation about ethical open source. It takes the position that values belong in community norms, not in license terms — preserving both legal clarity and moral purpose.
Palimpsest Community Covenant v1.0 Published by the Palimpsest Stewardship Council, 2026 https://github.com/hyperpolymath/palimpsest-license