Lesser Virtue Public License (LVPL) Version 1.0 PREAMBLE This License rests on a single question: not whether an act conforms to a rule, but what kind of agent the act makes of the one who performs it. We become what we repeatedly do. Software infrastructure is repeated practice at scale, and so it forms character — in those who operate it and in those it is operated upon. Virtue cannot be reduced to a procedure. There is no checklist that yields the right action, because the right action is what a person of practical wisdom would do in these particular circumstances, attentive to particulars that any rule would erase. This License therefore does not supply a test you can pass by ticking boxes. It asks something harder and plainer: that, where your software bears upon people, you state publicly what your deployment cultivates — in you and in them — and submit that statement to the judgement of those it affects. Software is action at scale, but not every act of touching software bears on character. Merging a fix into a date parser shapes no one; operating a system upon people shapes everyone involved. This License distinguishes the two. It asks almost nothing of those who merely build and pass along components, and it asks the central thing — a public account of character — only of those who deploy a system so that it bears upon persons. The licensor does not judge whether your deployment is virtuous. The condition is that you give an honest account of the dispositions it cultivates and the vices it borders, and that you stand by it where those affected can see it. The act of giving that account is itself an exercise of one virtue — truthfulness about what one is doing — and that is the virtue this License can require without pretending to certify the rest. This License is a free-software license but is NOT certified as Open Source by the OSI, and likely could not be: its obligations extend to a Larger Work and are triggered by run-time use. This is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. This is the LESSER form of the Virtue Public License. It is identical to the Virtue Public License (VPL) except that it adds a compatibility valve: where a Covered Work is combined with code under a license that forbids further conditions or grants recipients the right to strike them — such as the GNU GPL or AGPL — this License steps back, so that the combination remains lawful to distribute. In that zone of combination the Constitutive Condition survives as a public call rather than as an enforceable term. Use the LVPL when you need your work to interoperate with strong copyleft; use the VPL when you do not, and want the Constitutive Condition to keep its full force. DEFINITIONS "The Work" means the software or other material licensed under this License. "You" means any natural or legal person exercising rights under this License. "Covered Work" means the Work and any library, module, or component licensed under this License. "Larger Work" means the integrated software system You build, deploy, or operate that incorporates or depends on at least one Covered Work. The dependency may be at build time or run time, and direct or transitive. The boundaries of a Larger Work are the boundaries of the system You actually ship or operate. They are not the boundaries of any single file, package, or process. "Affected Persons" means the natural persons to whom a Consequential Deployment is applied or about whom it operates: its users, the subjects of its decisions, the subjects of its data, and those whose options it constrains or enlarges. "Consequential Deployment" means operation or distribution of a Larger Work where that Larger Work, in normal use, bears upon Affected Persons: by making or materially informing decisions about them; by surveilling, identifying, scoring, or sorting them; by restricting or enabling their access, movement, speech, or resources; or by processing their personal data for any of the foregoing. Internal tooling, libraries, build systems, and software whose normal operation does not bear upon any person are NOT Consequential Deployments. "Operator" means the natural or legal person who effects a Consequential Deployment: the person who, in fact, operates the Larger Work upon Affected Persons or distributes it for that purpose. Where several persons act together, each is an Operator to the extent of their own conduct. "Character Account" means a public statement by the Operator concerning a Consequential Deployment, addressing the matters set out in Section 3.3: the particular circumstances of the Deployment; the dispositions it cultivates in the Operator and in Affected Persons; and the ways it can go wrong, named as candidly as its benefits. A Character Account is not a certification of virtue and is not validated by the licensor; it is a position taken in the open. SECTION 1. GRANT OF RIGHTS Subject to the conditions below, You are granted a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, and create derivative works of the Work, and to do the same with any Larger Work in which it is incorporated. SECTION 2. PROVENANCE (the light obligation) 2.1. Whenever You distribute or operate a Larger Work, You must (a) preserve this License and the notices attached to each Covered Work, and (b) make it reasonably discoverable that the Larger Work contains a Covered Work. 2.2. No Character Account is required by this Section. A library is conveyed as a library. A contributor who builds or passes along a Covered Work, and who does not themselves effect a Consequential Deployment, owes nothing beyond this Section. SECTION 3. THE CONSTITUTIVE CONDITION (the weighty obligation) 3.1. Trigger. Upon Consequential Deployment of a Larger Work, and upon each material change in how it bears upon Affected Persons, the Operator must publish a Character Account. 3.2. Scope. The Character Account is the account of the Consequential Deployment taken as a whole — of what You, in operating this system upon these persons, become and cause others to become. It is not an account of any Covered Work within it, and a Covered Work buried deep in Your dependency graph does not lessen the obligation: the duty attaches to the deed, not to the depth of the dependency. The date parser forms no one; the system You point at people does. The account must address Your actual circumstances in their particularity, not an abstraction of them: a person of practical wisdom judges the case in front of them, and so must You. 3.3. Content. The published Character Account must state, in plain language: (a) the particular circumstances of the Deployment — who is affected, in what situation, under what constraints — described concretely enough that the judgement is about this case and not a generic one; (b) the dispositions the Deployment cultivates by its repeated operation: what it habituates You, the Operator, to do and to see; and what it habituates Affected Persons to accept, expect, or become; (c) the ways this Deployment can go wrong — the harms it risks and the failure of character it is nearest to — described as candidly as its benefits; and (d) any superseded Character Account together with the date of its revision, so that the record is not erased. 3.4. Publicity and Honesty. The Character Account must be public, discoverable, and honest. An account You are unwilling to state publicly, or that misrepresents what the Deployment cultivates, is a breach of this License. SECTION 4. PROPAGATION 4.1. The Larger Work, when distributed or operated, remains governed by this License. You may license Your own original portions under additional terms of Your choosing. This is permitted provided the obligations of Sections 2 and 3 are preserved — not removed, sublicensed away, or otherwise restricted — EXCEPT to the extent that Section 4.3 permits. You may impose no further restriction on a recipient's exercise of the rights granted here. 4.2. The Section 3 obligation attaches to the Operator, and not to every upstream contributor. Upstream contributors and redistributors who do not themselves effect a Consequential Deployment owe only Section 2. 4.3. Compatibility valve for strong copyleft. If a Covered Work is combined into a single work with material licensed under a license that (a) prohibits the imposition of conditions beyond its own terms, or (b) grants recipients the right to remove additional terms — including the GNU General Public License (versions 2 and 3) and the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 — then, with respect to that combined work and to the extent required for its lawful distribution and use: (i) Section 3 applies as a REQUEST, not as an enforceable requirement: the Operator is asked, but not legally bound under this License, to publish a Character Account; and (ii) Section 4.1 does not prevent a recipient from exercising any right that the other license confers, including the right to remove the obligations of this License from the combined work. This valve is the narrowest step-back needed to make distribution lawful. It does not reach Covered Works distributed on their own, or Larger Works that do not incorporate such strong-copyleft material; as to those, Sections 3 and 4.1 retain their full force. SECTION 5. TERMINATION 5.1. Your rights under Section 3 terminate automatically upon a Consequential Deployment made without the published declaration that Section 3 requires, or upon a knowing misrepresentation in that declaration. 5.2. Rights are reinstated upon publication of a truthful and complete declaration and cure of the breach, unless the licensor has terminated in writing for repeated or willful violation. 5.3. Termination of Your rights does not terminate the rights of those downstream who remain in compliance. SECTION 6. NO VIRTUE POLICING BY THE LICENSOR The licensor does not approve, rank, or veto Your Character Account, and does not judge whether Your Deployment is virtuous. The condition is that You give the account and stand by it — not that the licensor find You good. The reckoning is Yours to make and Yours to own; the public record exists so that those affected, who are best placed to know what the Deployment does to them, may judge. SECTION 7. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY THE WORK IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NONINFRINGEMENT. SECTION 8. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES, OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT, OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF, OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE WORK OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE WORK. - - - Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. Derivative licenses must use a different name and must not imply endorsement by, or compatibility with, the Lesser Virtue Public License. APPENDIX: HOW TO APPLY THIS LICENSE TO YOUR WORK To apply the Lesser Virtue Public License to your software, attach the following notice. Replace the bracketed fields with your own information, and place the notice where a recipient can readily see it (for example, at the top of each source file, or in a NOTICE file alongside the LICENSE file). Copyright (C) [year] [name of copyright holder] This work is licensed under the Lesser Virtue Public License, Version 1.0. You may use, modify, and distribute it under the terms of that License. If you effect a Consequential Deployment of this work or of a Larger Work containing it, you must publish a Character Account as required by Section 3. This work is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. See the License for the full terms, including the disclaimer of warranty and limitation of liability. Include a complete copy of the License text (this document) in a file named LICENSE, or at a stable, publicly accessible location referenced by the notice above.