Hard questions

No. Open source is the right answer for most software and we use it ourselves. Our claim is narrow: for big, user-facing software that needs sustained money, a price of zero leaves the project to be paid for by volunteers or by companies with their own interests. Open ownership is an option for that case. If it isn't your case, it isn't for you.

Because it wouldn't qualify, and it shouldn't. The Open Source Definition rules out conditions on use, and we have one. We'd rather describe it accurately — source available — than apply, be rejected, and look as if we'd tried to sneak in.

Because donations are a minimum of zero. Most people who'd happily pay never do, not out of greed but because nothing ever asks them at the right moment. The annual declaration is that moment. It's a warmer, more local version of the donation banner, with the difference that it comes with ownership.

AGPL is a fine licence, but it can't reach the types, components and functions people build inside an application like Kanecta, and its obligation only runs to a service's users, so in practice almost nobody sees anyone's source. And a donation page still leaves the funding, and so the control, with whoever gives the most.

Not much — and that's deliberate. The trust is designed so that going bad gets you nothing. It can't sell the software, can't profit from it, can't close the source, and can't stop anyone forking it. Trustees are eventually chosen by lot, and nobody holds a power to appoint them. If it were captured anyway, the members could fork and walk away, leaving the captor an empty name.

You can fork it. You can't drop the condition, because it isn't in the code — it's on each person using it. Forking the code, or starting a new member organisation, leaves every person involved in the same position. There's nothing to fork your way out of, which is exactly why everything else can stay free.

Honour and law. Large organisations don't knowingly breach licences; their lawyers, auditors and procurement teams won't let them. So compliance concentrates where most of the money is. Some individuals won't pay, and we'd rather live with that than build surveillance into software people are meant to own. The only technical part is a reminder that can't legally be removed, and it never blocks anything.

Some might. But the declaration is visible to the other people in their own member organisation, who know them. The honest person claims freely and is never questioned; someone faking it has to do so in front of people who know them. That protects people in genuine need better than a means test, which buries the honest in paperwork and waves through the confident liar.

Companies are a different matter. Dressing a well-resourced organisation up as a pauper is caught by the licence's substance-over-form rule. Trust for persons; look-through for schemers.

Possibly, yes. A flat global price falls harder on people in poorer countries, and that sits uncomfortably with us. Hardship declarations soften it, but don't settle it. Whether the price should be a flat amount or a share of local purchasing power is one of our open questions.

A member organisation can't refuse anyone, can't means-test anyone, and can't expel anyone except for their conduct towards the organisation itself. If none is reasonably available to you, you decide that, and the condition doesn't apply. The only gate is five minutes a year.

You shouldn't have to. The design gives its authors no special power, no share and no veto, and the deed's core can't be changed by anyone, including them. If it works, they'll end up as a small minority of the owners. That's intended.