COSS Covenant™

The COSS Covenant is a legal framework designed to formalize shared commitments between founders, investors, and the open source community, effectively creating a firewall between the pressures of capital and the integrity of the code. It establishes clear, binding guidelines for governance, intellectual property, and community engagement to preventing the strategic misalignments that often lead to "rug-pulls" or costly forks. By codified these expectations early, the Covenant ensures that a company’s commercial ambitions do not cannibalize the open source project that powers them, balancing the interests of all stakeholders for long-term collaboration.

Mechanically, the Covenant creates a structured boundary between the project's "core" and the company's commercial offerings. It clearly delineates which assets remain free and permissively licensed—exercising the "right to distribute"—and which features, such as enterprise security or cloud hosting, are proprietary value-adds that exercise the "right to exclude". By locking these definitions into a transparent agreement, the Covenant provides investors with a de-risked, predictable asset while guaranteeing the community that their contributions will remain open.