# ULDA Server Community Source License 1.0

Version 1.0 — 16 October 2026

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

ULDA protocol and server concept: Mark Shaposhnik.

Server 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 compiled output of the
single-process ULDA Server, currently identified as `ulda-server` and
`@ulda/server`, together with its Server Manifest, protocol documentation,
migrations, deployment configuration, tests, examples, and other materials
expressly identified as part of an official server release distributed with
this License. The server's own materials inside official container images are
included; third-party layers 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 this single-process server product and releases
expressly identified as covered by it. A package or image rename alone does
not extend its scope to another product.

`ulda-core`, `ulda-auth`, Socket.IO, PostgreSQL, Node.js, operating-system
components and all other dependencies retain their own licenses, including
when bundled or distributed in the same image or stack. This License neither
replaces those terms nor grants additional rights in those materials.

Separately distributed ULDA Enterprise products, managed ULDA services and
other products require their own terms. A Modified Version of this server
remains subject to this License; changing its architecture or branding does
not make copied Covered Materials a separately licensed official product.

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.

“Server Functionality” means:

1. providing a backend for storing and retrieving opaque ULDA resources;
2. coordinating directed witness verification and atomic resource mutations;
3. exposing resource lifecycle operations through the ULDA server protocol; and
4. managing per-resource operation ordering, admission and live change delivery
   for connected ULDA clients.

These definitions describe the server as an integrated product. They do not
relicense the separately distributed core or SDK or claim exclusive rights
over general database, encryption, networking or programming techniques.

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

- a standalone ULDA-compatible server or resource backend;
- a port, replacement or substantial substitute for ULDA Server; or
- a hosted backend, managed server or API that exposes that functionality
  directly to third parties.

“Ancillary Application” means a larger application whose primary purpose is
materially different from the Server Functionality and which uses ULDA only as a
supporting component for encrypted application data, integrity, lineage, or
resource synchronization.

An Ancillary Application does not become a Functionally Equivalent Offering
merely because it connects to, runs, or includes an official ULDA Server
instance as its backend.

## 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
used to serve that end user or delivered to or executed on their 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 server or hosted ULDA backend remains
subject to Section 5.

These private-modification permissions do not authorize a Parallel Server
Implementation as defined in Section 5, including for internal use or as part
of an Ancillary Application.

## 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 Server Functionality sufficient to act as a
  replacement or substantial substitute for ULDA Server.

This Section does not prohibit:

- ordinary use of ULDA Server 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 Server 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.

### Parallel server implementations

A “Parallel Server Implementation” means an implementation or coordinated
deployment derived from, or developed through use of, the Covered Materials
that adds server-level parallel execution of resource requests, witness
verification, or resource mutations across multiple application worker threads,
application processes, or server nodes operating as one logical ULDA backend.
This includes a multi-threaded fork, worker-based port, cluster, or distributed
replacement, whether or not it is marketed as an Enterprise product.

Without a separate written commercial license expressly permitting that use,
You must not use the Covered Materials or a Modified Version to develop, test,
operate, distribute, or provide a Parallel Server Implementation, or knowingly
assist another person to do so. This restriction applies regardless of revenue,
whether the implementation is private or public, and whether it serves only
Your own Organization or an Ancillary Application. The private-fork and ordinary
application-use permissions above do not override this restriction.

This restriction does not prohibit asynchronous handling of multiple requests
within the official server's single application event loop; the internal
parallelism of its unmodified runtime, database, or other separately licensed
dependencies; connection pooling; or separate server instances serving isolated
resource datasets without cooperating as one backend. Ordinary integration,
configuration, security fixes, and maintenance that do not create a Parallel
Server Implementation remain subject to the other terms of this License.

The mandatory-law and independently-created-implementation limitations stated
above also apply to this restriction. It grants no exclusive rights over
multi-threading, clustering, or distributed computing as general techniques.

## 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;
3. for a Parallel Server Implementation under Section 5; or
4. 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](mailto: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.

To seek permission for a use requiring a commercial license, You must contact
the Licensors or their authorized licensing representative. Commercial pricing,
support, warranties, service levels, and payment terms are individually
negotiated with the applicant and governed by the separate agreement. This
License does not establish a fixed fee or subscription, or an automatic right
to receive a commercial license.

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.

---

**End of ULDA Server Community Source License 1.0**