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ULDA Core Community Source License 1.0

Version 1.0 — 13 August 2026

Copyright in the respective contributions © 2025–2026 Mark Shaposhnik and Vitalii Radko.

Protocol concept and original implementation: Mark Shaposhnik.

Subsequent implementation contributions and improvements: Vitalii Radko.

1. Scope and acceptance

“Licensors” means Mark Shaposhnik and Vitalii Radko, each solely with respect to the rights that person owns or is authorized to license in the Covered Materials.

“Covered Materials” means the source code and generated bundles of ulda-core, together with the ULDA Manifest, protocol documentation, test vectors, examples, and other materials expressly identified as part of an official ulda-core release distributed with this License.

Third-party materials and separately licensed files are excluded.

This License text is not a Covered Material and may be copied and distributed verbatim.

This License applies only to ulda-core. Future ULDA libraries, servers, SaaS or API services, container images, Enterprise products, and other separately distributed products require their own terms.

By exercising any permission granted under this License, You accept its terms. If You do not accept them, You may not exercise those permissions.

Nothing in this License restricts an act that applicable law permits and does not allow the Licensors to prohibit by contract.

This is a source-available license. It is not an OSI-approved open-source license.

2. Definitions

“You” means the individual or Organization exercising permissions under this License.

“Organization” means a corporation, company, partnership, sole proprietorship, association, foundation, non-profit organization, educational institution, public body, government body, or other organized entity.

“Control” means direct or indirect ownership of more than fifty percent of an entity’s voting interests or the power to direct its management or policies.

“Group” means an Organization together with every entity that Controls, is Controlled by, or is under common Control with it.

“Modified Version” means a work that copies, adapts, translates, ports, or modifies protected expression from the Covered Materials in a manner requiring permission under applicable law.

“Core Functionality” means:

1. creating a private ULDA origin;
2. deriving a public witness;
3. advancing an origin or witness chain; and
4. verifying whether a candidate continues a previously accepted chain.

“Functionally Equivalent Offering” means a product or service whose entire or primary purpose is to provide all or a material part of the Core Functionality as:

• a standalone ULDA-compatible implementation;
• a port, replacement, or substantial substitute for ulda-core; or
• a hosted service or API that exposes that functionality directly to third parties.

“Ancillary Application” means a larger application whose primary purpose is materially different from the Core Functionality and which uses ULDA only as a supporting component for authentication, authorization, integrity, lineage, or state-transition checks.

An Ancillary Application does not become a Functionally Equivalent Offering merely because it calls the public ulda-core API or includes an official bundle.

3. Community license

Subject to this License, each Licensor grants You, only to the extent of the rights controlled by that Licensor, a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and non-sublicensable copyright license to:

• use and run the Covered Materials;
• inspect and study them;
• copy and modify them;
• create private forks and Modified Versions;
• embed them in an Ancillary Application;
• distribute them in source or bundled form;
• use them in paid products and services; and
• provide them as part of a hosted Ancillary Application.

You may exercise these permissions if:

1. You are an individual acting solely for personal, educational, research, or other non-commercial purposes; or
2. You are a Qualifying Small Organization under Section 4.

Commercial use is permitted for a Qualifying Small Organization.

You may keep modifications and the source code of an Ancillary Application private. This License does not impose a source-publication requirement.

Every recipient must independently qualify under this License or obtain a separate commercial license.

An end user who merely accesses an Ancillary Application and does not deploy, integrate, modify, distribute, or use the Covered Materials separately does not need to qualify independently merely because the Covered Materials are delivered to or executed on that end user’s device.

Creating and maintaining a private Modified Version solely to integrate, operate, secure, or maintain a permitted Ancillary Application does not by itself create a Functionally Equivalent Offering. Offering or distributing that Modified Version as a standalone ULDA implementation remains subject to Section 5.

4. Revenue threshold

The “Revenue Threshold” is USD 1,000,000.

“Consolidated Gross Revenue” means the total worldwide gross revenue or gross receipts of the Group before deducting costs, operating expenses, owner compensation, contractor payments, or distributions. Bona fide transactions between Group members must be eliminated to avoid counting the same revenue twice.

Revenue must be calculated using the accounting standards legally required for the Organization’s consolidated financial statements. If no such standards apply, the Organization must use the method reflected in its official tax filings or externally prepared financial statements. If none exist, it must use a reasonable and consistently applied method based on its ordinary books and records.

An accounting method, fiscal year, revenue classification, or business arrangement must not be selected or changed primarily to avoid the Revenue Threshold.

Taxes collected solely for a government, bona fide loans, equity investments, and capital contributions are excluded. For each fiscal year tested under this Section, an Organization that has no reportable gross revenue or gross receipts must use its approved operating budget for that fiscal year.

Amounts recorded in a currency other than United States dollars must be converted using the average European Central Bank reference rate for the applicable period or, if unavailable, another comparable official central-bank rate.

A “Qualifying Small Organization” is an Organization whose Consolidated Gross Revenue:

1. did not exceed the Revenue Threshold during its most recently completed fiscal year; and
2. has not exceeded the Revenue Threshold during its current fiscal year to date.

If no fiscal year has been formally adopted, the calendar year applies. An Organization that has not completed its first fiscal year is tested using its current fiscal-year-to-date Consolidated Gross Revenue.

A freelancer or individual performing paid work is treated as an Organization whether or not the activity is formally registered. Their revenue includes gross receipts from all business and professional activities, but excludes salary from unrelated employment. When the Covered Materials are used for an employer or customer, that employer or customer must independently qualify or hold a commercial license.

Revenue or activity must not be divided, concealed, transferred, or recharacterized through members of the Group, contractors, accounts, deployments, or other arrangements primarily to avoid the Revenue Threshold. Affected revenue will be counted as though the arrangement had not occurred.

Crossing the threshold

“Threshold Crossing Date” means the date on which an Organization that previously qualified under this License first exceeds the Revenue Threshold.

Only an Organization that qualified immediately before its Threshold Crossing Date receives 90 calendar days to obtain a commercial license or stop exercising rights under this License.

Compliant earlier use does not become retroactively unlawful, and no retroactive fee is imposed solely because the threshold was crossed.

The 90-day period does not apply to intentional concealment or material misrepresentation of revenue, Control, or Group membership.

An Organization that already exceeds the Revenue Threshold when it first exercises rights under this License must obtain a commercial license before doing so.

Returning below the threshold

An Organization may qualify again from the first day of a fiscal year if:

1. its Consolidated Gross Revenue remained at or below the Revenue Threshold throughout the immediately preceding completed fiscal year;
2. it remains at or below the threshold in the current fiscal year to date; and
3. it otherwise complies with this License.

Requalification applies prospectively. It does not cure a previous violation, cancel an amount already due, or automatically terminate or modify an existing commercial agreement. That agreement continues according to its own terms.

5. Functionally equivalent and competitive uses

Regardless of revenue, You must not use the Covered Materials or a Modified Version as development, reference, training, comparison, testing, benchmarking, validation, certification, debugging, documentation, maintenance, or improvement material to create or provide a Functionally Equivalent Offering without a separate written commercial license.

In particular, without such a license You must not:

1. use, modify, translate, port, or adapt the Covered Materials to develop a Functionally Equivalent Offering;
2. use the Manifest, protocol documentation, examples, or test vectors to develop or validate a Functionally Equivalent Offering;
3. distribute, license, sell, host, or otherwise provide a Functionally Equivalent Offering developed through a prohibited use of the Covered Materials; or
4. knowingly enable or assist another person to do any of the foregoing.

This restriction applies even when the competing implementation:

• is written in another programming language;
• uses a different internal architecture;
• has different public names or branding; or
• provides a material part of the Core Functionality sufficient to act as a replacement or substantial substitute for ulda-core.

This Section does not prohibit:

• ordinary use of ulda-core inside an Ancillary Application;
• testing that an Ancillary Application correctly integrates the official package;
• private security research that is not used to provide a Functionally Equivalent Offering;
• unchanged redistribution of an official ulda-core artifact in compliance with Section 6; or
• acts that applicable mandatory law does not permit this License to restrict.

For clarity, this License does not claim copyright ownership over an abstract idea, mathematical principle, algorithm, interface, protocol behavior, or functionality as such.

Similar output or behavior alone does not establish that the Covered Materials were copied or used.

An implementation independently created without copying or adapting protected expression from the Covered Materials, and without exercising permissions granted under this License to develop, test, validate, or improve that implementation, is not restricted by this License merely because it provides similar functionality.

6. Distribution and notices

When distributing Covered Materials or a Modified Version, You must:

1. provide this License or an accessible link to it;
2. preserve copyright, authorship, attribution, and license notices;
3. identify materially modified files or portions; and
4. not represent a modified product as an official ULDA release.

For an embedded or minified bundle, notices may be provided in accompanying documentation or a LICENSE, NOTICE, or ABOUT file. You are not required to extract the bundle or publish the source code of the larger application.

Notwithstanding Sections 3 and 4 and the preceding notice requirements, GitHub, npm, jsDelivr, unpkg, registries, mirrors, archives, proxies, security scanners, and caches may store, inspect, cache, and transmit unchanged official artifacts when the official package or release metadata provides an accessible link to this License. This technical permission does not grant a recipient any right to use the Covered Materials beyond the other terms of this License and does not authorize a Functionally Equivalent Offering.

No rights to ULDA names, logos, trademarks, service marks, or other branding are granted except accurate descriptive references that do not imply endorsement, certification, or official status.

7. Commercial licensing, ownership, and other rights

A separate written commercial license is required:

1. after the Revenue Threshold transition period;
2. for a Functionally Equivalent Offering; or
3. for any use outside this License.

A commercial license covering all Covered Materials may be granted only by Mark Shaposhnik and Vitalii Radko jointly, or by a person or legal entity authorized in writing by each Licensor to license that Licensor’s respective rights.

Commercial licensing inquiries may be sent to mark@shaposhnik.ch. This address is an administrative contact only. Correspondence does not itself grant any rights; commercial rights arise only under a separate written agreement granted as described above.

A future company may administer community and commercial licensing only after receiving the necessary rights or licensing authority through a separate written agreement. Such a transfer or authorization does not terminate or narrow licenses already validly granted.

Commercial pricing, support, warranties, service levels, and payment terms are governed by the separate agreement.

This License grants no patent license. It also grants no rights in future ULDA products or other separately distributed products except as expressly stated. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

8. Termination and general terms

If You violate this License, Your rights continue if You fully cure the first notified violation within 30 days.

An uncured violation, repeated material violation, or intentional material misrepresentation terminates Your rights. Crossing the Revenue Threshold is governed by the 90-day period in Section 4.

Upon termination, You must stop using and distributing the Covered Materials. Rights of recipients who independently comply with this License are not terminated solely because Your rights ended.

THE COVERED MATERIALS ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, SECURITY, ACCURACY, OR RELIABILITY.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE LICENSORS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, BUSINESS, OR GOODWILL.

THE LICENSORS’ TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY WILL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT PAID DIRECTLY FOR USE OF THE COVERED MATERIALS DURING THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM. IF NOTHING WAS PAID, THE LIMIT IS ZERO TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

This License is governed by Swiss law, excluding conflict-of-law rules. Disputes are subject to the competent courts in Switzerland unless a separate written agreement provides otherwise.

If any provision is unenforceable, it will be enforced to the maximum extent permitted, and the remaining provisions remain effective. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver.

A signed commercial agreement controls where it expressly conflicts with this License.

The warranty disclaimers, liability limitations, governing-law and dispute provisions, and obligations accrued before termination survive termination.

The Licensors may publish new versions of this License. A release remains governed by the version distributed with that release unless You and the applicable Licensors agree otherwise in writing. A new version does not retroactively change the terms governing an earlier release.

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End of ULDA Core Community Source License 1.0