# Zer0pa Source-Available License v7.1

**Licensor:** Zer0pa (Pty) Ltd, Republic of South Africa
**SPDX Identifier:** LicenseRef-Zer0pa-SAL-7.1
**Master Resolver Endpoint (initial):** https://github.com/Zer0pa/ZPE-License-Commercial (as defined in Section 20 and subject to the relocation mechanism there)
**License Date:** the date on which the Licensor first publishes this version at the Master Resolver Endpoint, as recorded by the Licensor at that endpoint, together with the corresponding release tag and content hash
**Effective Date:** in respect of any particular Product, the date of first public release of that Product's Software under this License, as recorded in that Product's public release metadata or version control tag
**Supersedes:** Zer0pa Source-Available License v7.0 (29 April 2026)

> **OPERATIVE RELEASE — COUNSEL-SIGNED-OFF VERSION (3 May 2026).** This version incorporates external counsel feedback and is operative as of first publication at the Master Resolver Endpoint.

---

## Preamble

This License governs use of the Software published by the Licensor.

The Licensor maintains a portfolio of independent Products, each Product addressing a bounded technical scope. The in-scope Products are listed in the Product Register at the Master Resolver Endpoint (Section 20.3(a)). The Products are held together by a shared engineering philosophy — finding the minimal, fundamental, falsifiable representation for a given technical scope, bounded to that scope — not by a single underlying technology, architecture, or substrate. Some Products share techniques; most do not. No claim of a single shared underlying technology, architecture, substrate, or generalised cross-Product system is made by this License or by the Product Register. The novelty position of each Product is stated solely in that Product's Product Novelty Schedule, maintained by the Licensor at the Master Resolver Endpoint and incorporated into this License under Section 20.3(g).

This License is the Licensor's default licence for Products in the portfolio. A Product within the portfolio is governed by this License unless the Licensor designates an alternative licence for that Product in the Product Register. Where the Product Register designates an alternative licence — including, without limitation, the Zer0pa Genesis-DM3 Research and Receipt License v1.0 for the DM3 and Genesis Computation artefacts, or Apache License 2.0 in conjunction with the Zer0pa Gnosis Portfolio Governance Document v1.0 for Products in the Gnosis Portfolio — that alternative licence governs that Product to the exclusion of this License. The Licensor's choice of an alternative licence for any Product is recorded in the Product Register and does not amend or affect this License or its application to other Products.

**For avoidance of doubt:** no repository, artefact, model, dataset, workstream, internal tool, staging repository, showcase repository, or unpublished material is governed by this License merely because it is owned, controlled, authored, hosted, or made available by the Licensor. Coverage under this License requires (i) affirmative designation in the Product Register and (ii) publication or release under this License with a conspicuous notice identifying the item as so licensed.

A Product in the portfolio may be an **Active** Product surface, a **Research in Progress** surface (in which case the Licensor's position for that Product is stated subject to ongoing research and may be revised, withdrawn, or restated in a future version of this License or in the Product's Product Novelty Schedule), or an **Evidenced Negative** reference (in which case the Schedule documents a publicly registered negative result and no positive claim is made for that Product under this License). The status of each Product is identified in its Product Novelty Schedule. A Product designated **Research in Progress** carries provisional Novel Contribution claims; the Licensor does not represent that the claims for any Research in Progress Product are settled, and the Licensor reserves the right to revise, restate, or withdraw such claims in a future Schedule version. Counterparties relying on a Research in Progress Schedule do so subject to that designation.

The Licensor may add further Products to the portfolio under this License from time to time, without publishing a new version of this License. Any such addition is governed by this License only upon (i) inclusion of the new Product in the Product Register at the Master Resolver Endpoint, (ii) publication of a corresponding Product Novelty Schedule for that Product at the Master Resolver Endpoint, expressly stated to be governed by and incorporated into this License under Section 20.3(g) for the sole purpose of describing the Novel Contributions of that new Product, and (iii) publication of a conspicuous notice at the canonical repository surface or release page for the new Product identifying it as licensed under this License and linking to the Master Resolver Endpoint. Acceptance of this License in respect of an already-released Product does not, by itself, constitute acceptance of this License in respect of a later-added Product; acceptance in respect of a later-added Product attaches under Section 2 when You first download, copy, use, distribute, or incorporate that later-added Product's Software after the foregoing notice has been published.

What is protected as novel is enumerated **per Product** in that Product's Product Novelty Schedule at the Master Resolver Endpoint. Each Schedule names the genuinely new contributions of that specific Product, with code citations resolvable through the Citation Index (Section 20.3(b)). Standard techniques used by Products are disclosed in the Consolidated Disclosures (Section 8). The Licensor claims novelty only where the Schedules say so.

The Licensor grants broad rights to individuals, researchers, open-source projects, and small organisations while requiring commercial entities above the Revenue Threshold to obtain a separate Commercial License. This License is not an open-source license as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). This License is a source-available license with delayed open-source conversion.

---

## 1. Definitions

**"Licensor"** means Zer0pa (Pty) Ltd, Republic of South Africa, including any successor entity or assignee of the intellectual property covered by this License.

**"Product"** means each item designated for coverage by this License in the Product Register at the Master Resolver Endpoint (Section 20.3(a)). The Product Register is the authoritative list. **An item is not a Product, and no Software for that item is made available under this License, unless the Product Register affirmatively designates that item for coverage by this License.** Where the Product Register designates an alternative licence for an item, that item is not a Product within the meaning of this License and that alternative licence governs it.

**"Software"** means, in respect of each Product, the source code, object code, binaries, documentation, test suites, validation artifacts, configuration files, and any other materials made available by the Licensor for that Product under this License, in each case as identified in or made available pursuant to that Product's Product Novelty Schedule. Whether a particular dataset, model weight set, trained checkpoint, generated evidence packet, generated dossier, or other output of the Software constitutes Software within the meaning of this License is determined by that Product's Product Novelty Schedule; if a Schedule does not affirmatively identify a category of artefact as Software, that category is not Software under this License. References to "the Software" in this License refer collectively to the Software of all Products covered by this License at the material time, save where the context indicates otherwise.

**"Product Novelty Schedule"** (or **"Schedule"**) means, in respect of each Product, the document published by the Licensor at the Master Resolver Endpoint that enumerates the Novel Contributions of that Product, with code citations resolvable through the Citation Index, and identifies the Product's status (Active, Research in Progress, or Evidenced Negative) and any technique-level identifications relevant to that Product (including, where applicable, whether the Product employs the Compass-8 Pattern). Each Schedule shall identify (a) its Schedule version, (b) its effective date, and (c) the prior Schedule version (if any) that it supersedes. Each Schedule is incorporated into this License under Section 20.3(g) for the sole purpose of describing the Novel Contributions of its Product; the substantive terms of this License apply unchanged to every Product, regardless of the content of its Schedule.

**"Novel Contribution"** means a specific technical contribution identified in a Product Novelty Schedule by the Licensor as original technical work for purposes of this License, as distinct from standard techniques disclosed in Section 8. The Licensor's claims under this License are limited to the Novel Contributions as enumerated in the applicable Schedule version in effect at the material time.

**"Compass-8 Pattern"** means the 8-directional spatial encoding pattern descended from Freeman chain codes (1961), in which signals are encoded as sequences of 3-bit directional tokens with associated magnitude and run-length channels. The Compass-8 Pattern is a Product-specific technique used by some Products and is not a portfolio-wide claim. Products that use it are identified in their respective Product Novelty Schedules.

**"Input class"** means the bounded class of source data, signal, corpus, problem instance, specimen, molecule, material, biological sequence, clinical record, or other technical input expressly identified in the applicable Product Novelty Schedule as the input scope of a Novel Contribution.

**"Output class"** means the bounded class of generated, predicted, encoded, transformed, ranked, evidenced, audited, or replayable outputs expressly identified in the applicable Product Novelty Schedule as the output scope of a Novel Contribution.

**"Audit surface"** means the Product-specific evidence, traceability, receipt, manifest, falsifier, provenance, reproducibility, or review interface expressly identified as part of a Novel Contribution in the applicable Product Novelty Schedule.

**"Verification surface"** means the Product-specific test, replay, validation, parity, benchmark, proof, falsification, or conformance surface expressly identified as part of a Novel Contribution in the applicable Product Novelty Schedule.

**"Substantially Similar Implementation"** means any system that replicates one or more Novel Contributions identified in a Product Novelty Schedule, as determined by the following three-part test applied **per Product**:

1. **Purpose equivalence:** The system addresses the same technical scope as the Product whose Novel Contribution is at issue. For an encoding Product, this means the same signal domain. For a pipeline or computation Product, this means the same Input class and the same Output class as enumerated in the applicable Schedule.
2. **Mechanism equivalence:** The system employs the same core technique identified as a Novel Contribution in the relevant Product Novelty Schedule — not merely a standard technique disclosed in Section 8.
3. **Integration equivalence:** The system combines the mechanism with the same Product-specific contract, packet format, output specification, Audit surface, or Verification surface described in the Novel Contribution, or with a contract, packet format, output specification, Audit surface, or Verification surface that differs only in immaterial cosmetic respects from that described in the Novel Contribution.

For the purpose of clause 3, a system that replicates a Novel Contribution's mechanism but employs a cosmetically different contract, packet format, output specification, Audit surface, or Verification surface designed primarily to defeat the integration-equivalence prong shall be deemed to satisfy clause 3. Whether a divergence is immaterial or cosmetic is to be assessed by reference to all relevant evidence, including, without limitation: whether the divergence serves any genuine technical purpose independent of this License, whether contemporaneous design documentation records such a purpose, and whether the resulting system would be functionally interchangeable with an implementation that retained the original contract, packet format, output specification, Audit surface, or Verification surface. The absence of contemporaneous documentation of a genuine technical purpose may be considered with all other relevant evidence and may weigh against a finding that the divergence is material.

A system that uses only standard techniques disclosed in Section 8, or that employs a genuinely independent mechanism for the same scope, is not a Substantially Similar Implementation.

For the avoidance of doubt: the mere use of directional encoding, delta encoding, run-length encoding, Freeman chain codes, FFT truncation, template matching, or any other standard technique disclosed in Section 8 — whether with 8, 4, 16, or any other number of directions or primitives — does not by itself constitute a Substantially Similar Implementation. A system falls within scope only if it replicates a specific Novel Contribution as described in the applicable Product Novelty Schedule.

**"You"** (or **"Your"**) means the individual or legal entity accepting this License, including any entity on whose behalf You act. Where the Software is accessed, used, copied, incorporated, analysed, or deployed by or through an autonomous agent, AI system, large language model, software agent, or other automated system, "You" refers to the human or legal entity that deploys, operates, directs, controls, hosts, trains, fine-tunes, benefits from, or makes available that automated system, as further provided in Section 10.

**"Your Company"** means any legal entity, sole proprietorship, or organisation that You work for, act on behalf of, or direct, plus all organisations that have Control over, are under the Control of, or are under common Control with that organisation. "Control" means ownership of more than 50 percent of the outstanding voting securities of an entity, or the power to direct the management and policies of an entity by contract or otherwise. Control may be direct or indirect.

**"Annual Gross Revenue"** means the total consolidated gross revenue of You and Your Company during the most recently completed fiscal year, calculated on a consolidated basis across all entities within the meaning of Your Company, regardless of the source of that revenue.

**"Revenue Threshold"** means USD $100,000,000 (one hundred million United States Dollars) in Annual Gross Revenue.

**"Commercial License"** means a separate written license agreement executed between You (or Your Company) and the Licensor, available from the Licensor Contact published at the Master Resolver Endpoint (as at the publication date of this License, that address is `architects@zer0pa.ai`).

**"Hosted or Managed Service"** means any deployment of the Software, any implementation of a Novel Contribution, or any Substantially Similar Implementation, where a third party accesses features or functionality thereof over a network, without receiving a copy of the underlying source code. Without limitation, Hosted or Managed Service includes: software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings; application programming interface (API) access; hosted inference endpoints; managed tokenization, encoding, transcoding, pipeline-execution, dossier-generation, evidence-packet-generation, or model-training services; platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings incorporating any Novel Contribution; internal service bureau or shared-platform deployments that provide functionality to customers, partners, or unaffiliated entities of Your Company; and any arrangement where a third party receives the functional benefit of the Software or a Novel Contribution through network access, regardless of whether the third party interacts directly with the Software or through an intermediary layer, wrapper, adapter, or gateway. A deployment qualifies as a Hosted or Managed Service regardless of whether access is offered for a fee, bundled with other services, or provided at no charge. **Hosted or Managed Service does not include ordinary internal use by You or Your Company that does not provide the Software, a Novel Contribution, or the functional benefit thereof to customers, partners, unaffiliated entities, or external users.**

**"Production Use"** means any use of the Software or any Novel Contribution that directly or indirectly generates, supports, or enables revenue for You or any entity that benefits from Your operations, or any use in a customer-facing, commercially deployed, or mission-critical context. Internal development, testing, academic research, non-commercial evaluation, and personal projects are not Production Use, provided they do not generate external revenue or serve external customers.

**"Open Source Project"** means a project whose complete source code is made available to the public under an OSI-approved open-source license and which does not itself require a Commercial License for use.

**"Contribution"** means any source code, documentation, data, test, or other material submitted to the Licensor for inclusion in the Software.

**"Change Date"** means the date three (3) years after the date of first public release of each specific version of the Software, as recorded in the version's release metadata or version control tag.

---

## 2. Acceptance

2.1 This License is a binding legal agreement between You and the Licensor. You accept this License by any of the following acts:

1. downloading the Software;
2. copying any portion of the Software;
3. using the Software in any manner;
4. distributing the Software or any derivative work;
5. incorporating the Software into any product, service, or system, or incorporating any Novel Contribution into any product, service, or system following Substantive Prior Access (as defined in Section 4.5(d)) to the Software or materials referencing this License, in each case where You have notice of this License;
6. clicking "I accept" or equivalent in any installation, download, or access interface provided by the Licensor;
7. any other act that, under applicable law, constitutes acceptance of the terms of a license agreement.

2.2 If You do not agree to all the terms and conditions of this License, You must not download, copy, use, or distribute the Software. If You have already downloaded a copy, You must destroy it.

2.3 For avoidance of doubt, the mere act of reading publicly available descriptions of the Software does not by itself constitute acceptance of this License. However, any subsequent use, download, or incorporation of the Software or any Novel Contribution following such reading is subject to this License.

2.4 **Transition from Prior Versions.** Acceptance of a prior version of the Zer0pa Source-Available License, including v7.0, does not by itself constitute acceptance of this License. This License applies to a Product, version, release, copy, derivative work, implementation of a Novel Contribution, or Substantially Similar Implementation only where You accept this License under this Section 2 after this License has been published and made applicable to that Product, version, release, or Software. Prior versions of the Zer0pa Source-Available License remain governed by the licence terms under which they were originally accepted, except to the extent You separately accept this License or enter into a Commercial License.

---

## 3. Grant of Rights

Subject to the limitations and conditions of this License, the Licensor grants You a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, non-sublicensable, non-transferable license to:

1. use, copy, and distribute the Software;
2. prepare and distribute derivative works of the Software;
3. make the Software available to third parties;
4. study, analyse, benchmark, and evaluate the Software;

in each case solely as permitted by the conditions in Section 4 below. The permissions in this Section 3 are conditions precedent to and conditions of the licence grant and are limited by Section 4. Conduct outside the scope of those conditions is outside the licence grant and is not authorised use of the Software.

---

## 4. Commercial Terms — Portfolio-Wide

### 4.1 Hosted or Managed Service Restriction

You may not provide the Software, any implementation of a Novel Contribution, or any Substantially Similar Implementation to third parties as a Hosted or Managed Service without obtaining a Commercial License from the Licensor. This restriction applies regardless of whether the service is offered for free or for a fee, and regardless of whether it constitutes the primary or ancillary function of the service.

### 4.2 Revenue Threshold and Commercial License Requirement

If Your Annual Gross Revenue exceeds the Revenue Threshold, You must obtain a Commercial License from the Licensor before:

1. using the Software or any implementation of a Novel Contribution in any Production Use;
2. offering any Hosted or Managed Service incorporating the Software or any Novel Contribution;
3. distributing the Software or any derivative work in connection with a commercial product or service;
4. incorporating the Software or any Substantially Similar Implementation into any product, platform, service, or system that You or Your Company offers commercially.

This requirement applies regardless of whether Your use of the Software is the source of any portion of Your Annual Gross Revenue.

This requirement does not apply to:

1. non-profit organisations, educational institutions, and government-funded research institutions, provided such use is not for commercial production deployment or commercial revenue generation;
2. Open Source Projects distributed under OSI-approved licenses, provided the project itself does not require a Commercial License and is not maintained or funded primarily by an entity exceeding the Revenue Threshold;
3. internal evaluation, academic research, development, and testing that does not constitute Production Use;
4. individuals and organisations whose Annual Gross Revenue does not exceed the Revenue Threshold.

### 4.3 Revenue Threshold Compliance

4.3.1 **Self-Certification.** Upon written request by the Licensor (no more than once per calendar year), You must provide a written certification signed by an authorised officer of Your Company, within thirty (30) days of such request, stating either:

1. that Your Annual Gross Revenue does not exceed the Revenue Threshold, together with the fiscal year to which the certification relates; or
2. that Your Annual Gross Revenue exceeds the Revenue Threshold, and specifying whether You have obtained or intend to obtain a Commercial License.

Certifications under this Section 4.3.1 shall be treated by the Licensor as confidential information and used only for the purpose of administering this License or, where applicable, a Commercial License.

4.3.2 **Record Retention.** If You certify that Your Annual Gross Revenue does not exceed the Revenue Threshold, You must retain financial records sufficient to substantiate that certification for a period of three (3) years from the date of certification.

4.3.3 **Verification.** If the Licensor has a reasonable, good-faith belief that Your Annual Gross Revenue exceeds the Revenue Threshold — based on publicly available information, Your own disclosures, or other credible evidence — the Licensor may request that You engage a mutually agreed independent auditor, at the Licensor's cost, to verify Your Annual Gross Revenue solely for the purpose of determining whether the Revenue Threshold is exceeded. The audit shall be conducted under reasonable confidentiality terms agreed between the parties; the auditor shall report to the Licensor only the binary result (exceeds or does not exceed the Revenue Threshold), and shall not disclose the underlying figures to the Licensor. If the audit reveals that the Revenue Threshold is exceeded, You shall bear the reasonable cost of the audit and shall promptly obtain a Commercial License. This right may be exercised no more than once per calendar year.

4.3.4 **Failure to Certify.** If You fail to provide a certification within the thirty (30) day period specified in Section 4.3.1, the Licensor shall send a single written reminder notice. If You fail to provide the requested certification within fifteen (15) days of the reminder notice (or such longer period as the Licensor may grant at its discretion upon reasonable request), Your use of the Software shall be deemed Production Use by an entity exceeding the Revenue Threshold until such time as You provide the requested certification. **The deeming consequence is solely for determining licence compliance pending certification and does not constitute an admission, representation, or finding that the Revenue Threshold is in fact exceeded.** For avoidance of doubt, the deeming consequence applies prospectively from the expiry of the reminder period and does not retroactively affect use prior to the original certification request.

### 4.4 Anti-Circumvention

You may not:

1. alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or attribution notices in the Software;
2. move, change, disable, or circumvent any license key or access-control functionality in the Software;
3. remove or obscure any functionality in the Software that is controlled by license keys;
4. structure a transaction, corporate arrangement, or series of arrangements the purpose or effect of which is to avoid the Revenue Threshold or Commercial License requirement;
5. use the Software through an intermediary, subsidiary, contractor, or agent for the purpose of circumventing the restrictions in this License;
6. create, distribute, or operate a Substantially Similar Implementation for the purpose of enabling third parties to avoid obtaining a Commercial License;
7. engage, contract, or otherwise arrange for a third party to create, develop, or operate a Substantially Similar Implementation on Your behalf or for Your benefit, where You or Your Company exercises management control over, provides funding for, or derives commercial benefit from the implementation, regardless of the third party's own Annual Gross Revenue;
8. implement a Substantially Similar Implementation while taking measures to obscure or obfuscate the relationship to a Novel Contribution, including through renaming, mathematical reformulation, obfuscation of provenance, or claims of independent discovery where Substantive Prior Access exists.

This Section 4.4 supplements and does not limit Section 4.1.

### 4.5 Substantive Prior Access and Burden-Shifting

You acknowledge and agree that the Novel Contributions enumerated in the Product Novelty Schedules at the Master Resolver Endpoint are identified by the Licensor as original technical work for purposes of this License. By accepting this License pursuant to Section 2:

(a) You accept that any implementation of a Novel Contribution — including any Substantially Similar Implementation, whether derived from the Software or independently developed — by an entity that has accepted this License and is subject to Section 4.2, requires a Commercial License;

(b) You accept that the three-part per-Product test in the definition of "Substantially Similar Implementation" (Section 1), not source code similarity, is the operative test for determining whether a system falls within scope;

(c) You accept that this License and the Licensor's public documentation serve as public notice of the Licensor's claims with respect to the Novel Contributions;

(d) You accept that, in any dispute between the Licensor and You or Your Company, if You or Your Company has downloaded, forked, executed, deployed, incorporated, or otherwise made substantive use of the Software or any materials referencing or describing the Novel Contributions that include a reference to this License (collectively, **"Substantive Prior Access"**), any Substantially Similar Implementation by You or Your Company shall be presumed to derive from the relevant Novel Contribution, and the burden of proving independent and non-infringing development shall rest on You. **This presumption is rebuttable and shall operate only as an evidentiary allocation of the burden between the parties to this License. It does not prevent You from proving independent development, non-use, non-derivation, or lawful implementation by contemporaneous technical, organisational, access-control, repository, design-history, or clean-room records.** This presumption applies to Your Company as a whole if any employee, contractor, advisor, or agent of Your Company has had Substantive Prior Access, regardless of whether the specific individuals who had Substantive Prior Access were involved in the development of the Substantially Similar Implementation. The presumption is rebuttable: You may overcome it by demonstrating, through contemporaneous written documentation, that the Substantially Similar Implementation was developed through a documented independent-development or clean-room process in which no person with Substantive Prior Access participated in, directed, supervised, or reviewed the design or implementation of the Substantially Similar Implementation. The absence of such contemporaneous documentation may be considered with all other relevant evidence and may weigh against any claim of independent development.

(e) **Clean-Room Safe Harbour.** A party may rebut the presumption under Section 4.5(d) by demonstrating, through contemporaneous records, that the relevant implementation was developed through a clean-room, independent-development, or independently sourced process reasonably designed to prevent use of the Software or the Novel Contributions by persons involved in the implementation. Records evidencing such a process may include, without limitation: documented access controls; documented information barriers; records of personnel rotation or recusal; design specifications generated independently of the Software; and contemporaneous review records demonstrating that no person with Substantive Prior Access participated in, directed, supervised, or reviewed the design or implementation of the implementation.

4.5.1 For avoidance of doubt: this Section 4.5 creates contractual obligations binding on parties who have accepted this License under Section 2. It does not purport to create binding obligations on third parties who have never accessed the Software and have never accepted this License. However, the Licensor reserves all rights available under applicable law with respect to any third party's use of the Novel Contributions.

### 4.6 Attribution and Notices

Any distribution of the Software or derivative work must:

1. retain all copyright notices, attribution notices, and a complete copy of this License or a working link to its Canonical URL;
2. include a prominent notice in any modified copies stating that You have modified the Software and the date of modification;
3. include a reasonable, field-appropriate citation to the Licensor and to this License in any academic, scientific, or technical publication that describes, evaluates, or builds upon the Novel Contributions. A citation that follows the ordinary scholarly citation conventions of the relevant field satisfies this requirement, and nothing in this clause prevents independent, critical, negative, or adverse evaluation of the Software or the Novel Contributions, provided the citation remains truthful and non-misleading.

### 4.7 Provenance and Integrity

When distributing, publicly referencing, or making available the Software or any claimed "ZPE-compatible," "ZPE-derived," "Zer0pa-compatible," or "Zer0pa-derived" implementation, You must:

1. retain all integrity hashes, manifests, attribution notices, and provenance metadata published by the Licensor, to the extent reasonably applicable to the form and scope of distribution. Where You distribute only a bounded portion of the Software, a heavily transformed derivative, or a package-ecosystem artefact in which full manifest retention is not technically practicable, You must instead retain (x) the Licensor attribution notice, (y) a reference to this License and its Canonical URL, and (z) a pointer to the corresponding upstream release from which the distributed portion or derivative was taken;
2. clearly and prominently mark any modifications You have made, including the date, nature, and author of each modification, with a level of detail reasonably proportionate to the scope of the modification;
3. not selectively remove, alter, or suppress failing, INCONCLUSIVE, or adverse test results or evidence artifacts in a manner that misrepresents the completeness or accuracy of the original materials;
4. not present modified benchmark results, gate outcomes, or evidence artifacts as unmodified originals without clearly stating the nature and extent of the divergence from the Licensor's published originals;
5. not make any public claim of "ZPE-compatible," "ZPE-derived," "Zer0pa-compatible," "Zer0pa-derived," or any functionally equivalent compatibility or derivation claim unless such claim is objectively substantiated by reference to published evidence materials, and where the Licensor has published conformance criteria for a particular Product or designation, such substantiation shall include reference to those criteria.

For avoidance of doubt, this Section does not restrict Your right to create and publish independent benchmark results, evaluations, or analyses of the Software, provided such independent work is clearly identified as Your own and is not presented as the Licensor's official results. If You make a claim covered by this Section that is materially false or misleading, then upon written notice from the Licensor You must (within ten (10) days) either (x) correct the claim with equal or greater prominence, or (y) cease using the applicable Licensor-related compatibility/derivation designation in connection with the affected materials; failure to do so constitutes a material breach of this License.

### 4.8 Downstream License Propagation

While distributing the Software, any derivative work, or any implementation of a Novel Contribution under this License (that is, prior to the Change Date for a given version, or where You have elected to use this License rather than Apache 2.0 for a converted version), You may not apply license terms that are less restrictive than this License with respect to the Revenue Threshold, the Hosted or Managed Service Restriction, or the scope of the Novel Contributions. Any sublicense, relicense, or redistribution under this License must preserve these restrictions in full.

After the Change Date, if You distribute a converted version of the Software under Apache 2.0, the Apache 2.0 terms govern that distribution. However, this does not grant You or any downstream recipient the right to offer the Novel Contributions as a Hosted or Managed Service, nor does it relieve You or any downstream recipient of obligations arising from their own independent acceptance of this License (if any) or from any separate Commercial License agreement with the Licensor. For the avoidance of doubt, a downstream recipient who receives the converted code solely under Apache 2.0, and who has never accepted this License, is governed solely by Apache 2.0 for their use of that code; the obligations in Section 6.3 attach only to parties who have accepted this License under Section 2.

---

## 5. Contributions

If You submit a Contribution to the Licensor:

1. **Copyright licence.** You grant the Licensor a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable license to use, modify, reproduce, distribute, sublicense, and commercially exploit Your Contribution as part of the Software;
2. **Patent licence.** You grant the Licensor and downstream recipients of the Software a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable patent licence under any patent claims You can license that are necessarily infringed by Your Contribution alone or in combination with the Software, to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and have imported the Contribution and the Software incorporating it. This patent licence does not extend to claims that are infringed only by modifications or additions made by recipients other than You, nor to combinations with materials not provided by You;
3. **Representations.** You represent that You have the legal right to grant the licences in clauses 1 and 2 above, that Your Contribution is Your original work or that You have all necessary rights to submit it, and that Your Contribution does not knowingly infringe any third-party intellectual property right;
4. **Patent retaliation as to Contributions.** If You initiate patent litigation against the Licensor or any other recipient of the Software alleging that Your Contribution or the Software infringes a patent, the patent licence in clause 2 above terminates as of the date such litigation is filed;
5. **No obligation to incorporate.** You acknowledge that the Licensor is not obligated to incorporate Your Contribution.

---

## 6. Change Date and Open-Source Conversion

6.1 On the Change Date applicable to each version of the Software, that version automatically becomes additionally available under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). From that date, You may use that version's source code and associated materials under either this License or Apache 2.0, at Your choice. **The Change Date is three (3) years from the date of first public release of that version.** Where the Software for different Products is released on different dates, the Change Date is computed independently per Product version, by reference to that version's first public release date as recorded in the Product's release metadata or version control tag.

6.2 For the avoidance of doubt:

1. versions of the Software released after the Change Date of an earlier version are not affected by that earlier Change Date and remain subject to this License until their own Change Date;
2. the Change Date conversion applies to the Software — that is, the specific source code, object code, and associated materials of the converted version. It does not constitute a release, waiver, or abandonment of the Licensor's broader intellectual property position, including rights arising from: defensive publication status; trademark and trade dress; contract claims against parties who accepted this License; and any other rights available under applicable law;
3. the Apache 2.0 license, as applied to a converted version, governs the use, modification, and redistribution of that version's code. Apache 2.0 does not itself contain a Hosted or Managed Service restriction, a Revenue Threshold, or a novelty-scope restriction. Accordingly, the Apache 2.0 terms do not impose those restrictions on downstream recipients who receive only the Apache 2.0 licensed code and who have not independently accepted this License.

6.3 Notwithstanding Section 6.2(c), the following restrictions survive the Change Date and continue to bind You **(as a party who accepted this License under Section 2)** even if You elect to use a converted version under Apache 2.0:

1. **Hosted Service survival.** If You accepted this License for any version of the Software and Your Annual Gross Revenue exceeds the Revenue Threshold, You must obtain a Commercial License before offering any Novel Contribution as a Hosted or Managed Service, regardless of whether Your implementation incorporates Apache 2.0 converted code, pre-conversion code, or independently written code. This obligation arises from Your acceptance of this License and the Substantive Prior Access presumption in Section 4.5(d), not from the Apache 2.0 license.
2. **Novelty claim survival.** The Licensor's claims with respect to the Novel Contributions (as supported by applicable law, trademark, and this License's contractual provisions) are not affected by the Change Date conversion.
3. **New parties.** A downstream recipient who receives the converted code solely under Apache 2.0, and who has never accepted this License, is governed solely by Apache 2.0 for their use of that code. However, such recipient's independent development or deployment of Novel Contributions may be subject to the Licensor's rights under applicable law, separate from this License.

---

## 7. Product Novelty Schedules

Each Product covered by this License has a Product Novelty Schedule maintained by the Licensor at the Master Resolver Endpoint. Each Schedule:

1. enumerates the Novel Contributions of its Product, with code citations resolvable through the Citation Index (Section 20.3(b));
2. identifies the Product's status as Active, Research in Progress, or Evidenced Negative;
3. identifies any technique-level designations relevant to that Product (including, where applicable, whether the Product employs the Compass-8 Pattern);
4. identifies, for pipeline or computation Products, the Product's Input class and Output class as those terms are used in the Substantially Similar Implementation test (Section 1);
5. identifies, where applicable, the Product's Audit surface and Verification surface as those terms are used in the Substantially Similar Implementation test (Section 1);
6. records any Product-specific honest limits or non-claims that bound the scope of the Novel Contributions for that Product;
7. identifies the Schedule version, the Schedule's effective date, and the prior Schedule version (if any) that it supersedes.

Each Schedule is incorporated into this License under Section 20.3(g) for the sole purpose of describing the Novel Contributions of its Product. The substantive terms of this License — including the grant of rights (Section 3), the Commercial Terms (Section 4), the Change Date mechanics (Section 6), the Consolidated Disclosures (Section 8), the patent license and retaliation provisions (Section 9), the Autonomous Agents and AI Systems provisions (Section 10), the trademark and other-rights provisions (Section 12), the dispute resolution provisions (Section 16), and all other operative sections — apply unchanged to every Product, regardless of the content of its Schedule.

The Licensor may add, update, correct, or retire entries in any Schedule at the Master Resolver Endpoint at any time. Such changes are not amendments to this License (Section 20.4 and Section 20.7).

**No Retroactive Expansion.** No update, correction, expansion, or retirement of a Product Novelty Schedule applies retroactively to (a) impose a new restriction on conduct that occurred before the update was published, (b) expand a Novel Contribution claim to cover conduct that occurred before the update was published, (c) alter the scope of the Substantially Similar Implementation test as applied to conduct that occurred before the update was published, or (d) create a Commercial License requirement for acts that occurred before the update was published. Schedule updates take effect prospectively only.

A Product whose Schedule designates **Research in Progress** status is licensed subject to that designation; the Licensor may revise, restate, or withdraw the Novel Contributions for such a Product in a future version of the Schedule without amending this License. The Licensor does not represent that the Novel Contribution claims for any Research in Progress Product are settled, and counterparties relying on a Research in Progress Schedule do so subject to that designation. A Product whose Schedule designates **Evidenced Negative** status carries no positive Novel Contribution claim and is licensed subject to that designation; nothing in such a Schedule shall be construed as implying a hidden or delayed positive claim.

In the event of any divergence between a code citation in a Schedule and the Licensor's published source repositories, the Novel Contribution as described in the Schedule controls (Section 19.4).

**Schedule Preservation.** The Licensor shall preserve or make reasonably available a dated historical copy of each retired or superseded Schedule sufficient to identify the Schedule version in force at the material time, together with the effective date, retirement date (if any), and reason for retirement or supersession. Retirement of a Schedule does not retroactively affect any prior use of the Software made under this License at a time when that Schedule was current.

For the avoidance of doubt: the Schedules at the Master Resolver Endpoint as at the License Date of this version, and as updated from time to time thereafter subject to the No Retroactive Expansion rule above, are the operative Schedules under this License. The Licensor does not maintain inline per-Product schedules within the body of this License under v7.1; the prior practice of inline schedules under earlier versions is superseded by the Master Resolver Endpoint mechanism.

---

## 8. Consolidated Disclosures — Standard Techniques Not Claimed

The following techniques are used by one or more Products. The Licensor explicitly **does not claim** these as novel. Their use does not, by itself, make a system a Substantially Similar Implementation.

**Encoding and compression primitives:**
delta encoding; run-length encoding (RLE); zigzag integer coding; unsigned and signed varint encoding; nibble packing; zlib compression; FFT / inverse FFT truncation and reconstruction; CRC16-CCITT and CRC32 integrity checks; SHA-256 digests.

**Signal processing:**
log-domain quantisation as a general technique; adaptive threshold / envelope tracking; template matching and template banks; quantile binning; z-score thresholding; Haversine distance checks.

**Directional encoding ancestry:**
Freeman chain codes (1961); generic 8-direction, 4-direction, or N-direction spatial quantisation; compass bearing binning.

**Data structures and indexing:**
k-gram indexing; inverted indexes; suffix arrays; cosine similarity; histogram comparison.

**Container and transport conventions:**
ASCII magic bytes + version byte; fixed-width binary headers; struct packing and parsing; JSON metadata packing; framed binary containers; canonical-JSON encoding; SHA-256 hash chains for ordered receipts.

**Pipeline and orchestration conventions:**
multi-layer pipeline architectures (input → transform → predict → aggregate → output); falsifier-registry patterns; audit-log append-only patterns; envelope schemas; plug-replaceability harnesses; parity tests across CPU and GPU backends; cross-model ensemble disagreement aggregators; Bayesian active-learning loops; multi-objective Pareto optimisation; standard SBOL3, PROV-O, JSON-LD, and BrAPI data models.

**Domain-standard tools:**
WFDB-based ECG dataset ingest; H3 spatial indexing; BVH parsing; NWB / PyNWB packaging; SpikeInterface evaluation; standard Unicode NFD normalisation; perfect-hash function (PHF) optimisation; Python / NumPy / Rust `no_std` implementation techniques; PyO3 / maturin packaging; `int16` / `int8` quantisation; standard cheminformatics tooling (RDKit, SELFIES); standard structural-biology tooling (ESM, MACE, PyMOL); standard plant-genomics tooling (PHGv2, BrAPI, PLINK 2 PGEN); standard materials simulation tooling (PySCF, GPAW, CP2K, LAMMPS); standard energy-systems tooling (PyBaMM, Cantera, OpenMC, PyPSA).

---

## 9. Patent License and IP Provisions

### 9.1 Patent Licence

The Licensor grants You a license, under any patent claims the Licensor can license or becomes able to license, to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and have imported the Software, subject to the limitations and conditions of this License. This patent license does not cover any patent claims that You cause to be infringed by modifications or additions to the Software, nor any patent claims that are infringed only by combinations of the Software with other products or services not provided by the Licensor.

### 9.2 Patent Retaliation — Automatic Termination

If You or Your Company (including any entity within the meaning of Your Company) directly or indirectly: (a) make, sponsor, fund, assist, or maintain any written claim or proceeding (including in litigation, in correspondence, demand letters, takedown notices, customs actions, administrative proceedings, or regulatory filings) alleging that the Software, any Novel Contribution, any Substantially Similar Implementation, or any use of any of the foregoing by the Licensor or any licensee, user, customer, or downstream recipient infringes any patent claim; or (b) seek any injunction, exclusion order, seizure, import ban, or other coercive relief based on any such patent allegation, then all rights and licenses granted to You and Your Company under this License — including, without limitation, all rights under Section 3 (Grant of Rights) and all licenses under this Section 9 — terminate automatically, immediately, and irrevocably as of the earliest date of such assertion. This Section 9.2 does not apply to a claim solely alleging breach of this License, nor to a counterclaim or defensive response filed only after the Licensor has first filed an action against You for breach of this License, and only to the minimum extent necessary to respond to that action.

### 9.3 Non-Patent IP Aggression — Conditional Termination

If You or Your Company directly or indirectly make, sponsor, fund, assist, or maintain any claim or proceeding alleging that the Software, any Novel Contribution, any Substantially Similar Implementation, or any use of any of the foregoing by the Licensor or any licensee, user, customer, or downstream recipient infringes or misappropriates any copyright, trade secret, database right, or other non-patent intellectual property right, the rights and licenses granted to You and Your Company under this License terminate automatically, immediately, and irrevocably only where the claim or proceeding:

(a) is made in bad faith;
(b) is objectively unreasonable;
(c) seeks coercive relief (including injunction, exclusion order, seizure, import ban, takedown, or equivalent) against the Licensor or any licensee, user, customer, or downstream recipient in relation to use of the Software or Novel Contributions that is otherwise authorised under this License or applicable law; or
(d) is not withdrawn within fifteen (15) days after the Licensor's written notice identifying the assertion and requesting withdrawal.

This Section 9.3 does not apply to a claim solely alleging breach of this License, nor to a counterclaim or defensive response filed only after the Licensor has first filed an action against You for breach of this License, and only to the minimum extent necessary to respond to that action.

### 9.4 Cure Mechanic for Pre-Litigation Assertions

Notwithstanding Sections 9.2 and 9.3, if the assertion giving rise to termination consists solely of a demand letter, pre-litigation correspondence, or takedown notice (and no litigation, administrative proceeding, injunction, or other coercive relief has been filed or sought), the Licensor shall provide written notice to You and You shall have fifteen (15) days from receipt of such notice to withdraw the assertion in writing; if You withdraw within that period, Your licenses shall be deemed not to have terminated by reason of that assertion alone. This cure opportunity applies once only; any subsequent assertion triggers immediate and irrevocable termination without further cure. Termination under this Section 9 is in addition to, and does not limit, any other remedies available to the Licensor.

### 9.5 Defensive Publication / Prior-Art Acknowledgement

You acknowledge that the Licensor's public disclosures describing the Novel Contributions are intended as defensive publications establishing the Licensor's priority of disclosure, and, to the maximum extent recognised under applicable law, constitute prior art for the purpose of assessing novelty, obviousness, and patentability and of invalidating or limiting subsequent patent claims by third parties over the Novel Contributions or any Substantially Similar Implementation. The Licensor may maintain timestamped, archived, hashed, or third-party indexed copies of public disclosures for evidentiary purposes, and such archival measures do not amend this License.

---

## 10. Autonomous Agents and AI Systems

If the Software is accessed, used, copied, incorporated, analysed, or deployed by or through an autonomous agent, AI system, large language model, software agent, or other automated system, the human or legal entity that deploys, operates, directs, controls, hosts, trains, fine-tunes, benefits from, or makes available that automated system is the contracting party and is the relevant user for purposes of this License. The autonomous agent or AI system itself is not treated as a separate legal contracting party, and the operating principal bears primary responsibility for compliance with this License.

For the avoidance of doubt:

1. Any access, use, copy, incorporation, distribution, derivative-work creation, or deployment of the Software by or through an automated system is deemed to be the act of the operating principal for purposes of acceptance under Section 2 and compliance under Section 4;
2. Where two or more entities deploy, operate, direct, control, host, train, fine-tune, or benefit from the same automated system, those entities are jointly and severally liable for compliance with this License with respect to that system's use of the Software;
3. The use of the Software or any Novel Contribution as training data, fine-tuning data, tokenisation vocabulary, subword segmentation scheme, encoding substrate, pipeline backbone, or evidence substrate for any AI system is subject to the same restrictions as Production Use if conducted by or on behalf of an entity exceeding the Revenue Threshold. For the avoidance of doubt, independent comparative evaluation or benchmarking of the Software against other systems does not by itself constitute Production Use under this clause, provided that (i) no Novel Contribution is incorporated into the evaluating entity's commercial products or services, (ii) the evaluation results are not presented as endorsed, verified, or certified by the Licensor, and (iii) any published results truthfully attribute the Software to the Licensor and identify the version of the Software evaluated;
4. If You or Your Company uses the Software or any Novel Contribution as training data, fine-tuning data, or as an encoding, tokenisation, pipeline, or representation substrate for any AI system, model, service, or documentation that is made available to customers, partners, external users, regulators, investors, or the public, You must disclose such use in the applicable documentation, model card, system card, technical file, customer documentation, or equivalent public- or counterparty-facing materials, including a reference to this License. Internal AI systems that are not made available to any party outside Your Company are not subject to this disclosure obligation. For the avoidance of doubt, independent comparative evaluation or benchmarking conducted within the scope of clause 3 above does not trigger this disclosure requirement; truthful attribution under clause 3(iii) and Section 4.7 is sufficient for such evaluation activities;
5. Contributions made by or through an automated system are governed by the same terms as contributions from human developers under Section 5, and the operating principal (not the automated system) is treated as the Contributor.

---

## 11. Notices

You must ensure that anyone who receives a copy of any part of the Software from You also receives a copy of this License or a working link to the Master Resolver Endpoint from which this License can be retrieved. You must include this License (or link) in any repository, package, archive, or distribution containing the Software or derivative works. A link to the then-current Master Resolver Endpoint, or to the Licensor's then-current published canonical URL for this License, satisfies this obligation.

---

## 12. No Other Rights

These terms do not imply any licenses other than those expressly stated. This License does not grant You any rights under patents necessary to implement specifications, standards, or protocols that the Software may use or implement, except as expressly granted in Section 9. No trademark license is granted under this License. The Licensor maintains a Trademark Register at the Master Resolver Endpoint (Section 20.3(c)), which is the authoritative list of trademarks, service marks, certification marks, reserved designations, and other designations claimed or reserved by the Licensor under or in connection with this License. Unauthorised use of any mark listed in the Trademark Register, or of any mark that is confusingly similar to a mark listed in the Trademark Register, is prohibited. As at the publication date of this License, the Trademark Register includes (without limitation) the corporate mark "Zer0pa," the technique-level marks "ZPE" and "Compass-8," and the Product-family and Product-specific marks listed in the Trademark Register; the Licensor may update the Trademark Register from time to time without amending this License, subject to Section 20.

**Reserved Certification-Style Designations.** The Licensor reserves the designations "ZPE-Compatible," "ZPE-Certified," "Zer0pa-Compatible," "Zer0pa-Certified," and confusingly similar marks or designations. No right is granted to use such designations under this License unless and until the Licensor separately authorises such use in writing, which may include participation in a certification, compatibility, or conformance programme established by the Licensor. The Licensor does not represent that any such certification, compatibility, or conformance programme currently exists; the reservation in this paragraph operates as a forward-looking notice and does not imply the existence of an active programme.

You may make truthful, non-misleading nominative references to the Licensor's marks solely to describe that the Software is licensed under this License or that Your work interoperates with unmodified Licensor-distributed interfaces, provided You do not state or imply sponsorship, endorsement, certification, or official compatibility. Use of any mark, marketing statement, or designation suggesting compatibility with, certification by, or endorsement by the Licensor (including any "ZPE-compatible," "Zer0pa-compatible," or similar claim not substantiated in accordance with Section 4.7) requires a separate written trademark license from the Licensor.

---

## 13. Termination

13.1 Your licenses under this License terminate automatically if You fail to comply with any of its terms.

13.2 If the Licensor provides You written notice of a violation, and You cure that violation within thirty (30) days of receiving that notice, Your licenses are reinstated retroactively as though they had never terminated — but only for that specific violation. Any subsequent material violation of the same or a substantially similar obligation, or any wilful, repeated, or uncured violation of this License, permanently and automatically terminates all licenses granted to You under this License. For the avoidance of doubt, an isolated, immaterial, or technical breach that is unrelated to a prior cured violation and that is itself promptly cured upon notice does not, by itself, trigger permanent termination under this Section 13.2.

13.3 Upon termination, You must cease all use, distribution, and deployment of the Software and any derivative works. Termination does not relieve You of liability for any breach occurring prior to termination.

13.4 The following provisions survive termination of this License: Sections 1 (Definitions), 4.4 (Anti-Circumvention), 4.5 (Substantive Prior Access and Burden-Shifting), 4.6 (Attribution and Notices) with respect to copies and derivative works distributed prior to termination, 4.7 (Provenance and Integrity), 4.8 (Downstream License Propagation) with respect to obligations arising prior to termination, 5 (Contributions), 6.3 (post-Change-Date survival), 7 (Product Novelty Schedules) and the Schedules incorporated thereunder, 8 (Consolidated Disclosures), 9 (Patent License and IP Provisions — including Sections 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, and 9.5), 10 (Autonomous Agents and AI Systems), 11 (Notices), 12 (No Other Rights), 13 (Termination), 14 (Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability), 15 (Commercial Licensing), 16 (Governing Law and Dispute Resolution), 17 (Assignment), 18 (Entire Agreement), 19 (License Precedence Over Operational Documentation), and 20 (Canonical References and Master Resolver Endpoint). For the avoidance of doubt, termination does not revive any rights surrendered, granted, or limited under the foregoing surviving sections.

13.5 **No Perpetual Maintenance Obligation.** Survival of Sections 19 and 20 preserves the interpretive and evidentiary effect of the Operational Documentation and Canonical References applicable at the material time. It does not impose any obligation on the Licensor to maintain any particular hosting provider, URL, repository structure, file path, operational publication format, or operational document indefinitely, nor any obligation to maintain any of the foregoing for the benefit of a party whose licences have terminated.

---

## 14. Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. THE LICENSOR SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF THE LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

---

## 15. Commercial Licensing

To obtain a Commercial License, contact the Licensor at the Licensor Contact published at the Master Resolver Endpoint. As at the publication date of this License, that address is **architects@zer0pa.ai**; the Licensor may update the Licensor Contact from time to time in accordance with Section 20 without amending this License.

Commercial Licenses are available for:

1. organisations exceeding the Revenue Threshold;
2. Hosted or Managed Service providers (including API, SaaS, managed inference, managed pipeline-execution, managed dossier-generation, and managed evidence-packet-generation offerings);
3. embedded, OEM, or hardware distribution (including FPGA, ASIC, edge, IoT, and on-device inference deployments);
4. AI training, tokenisation, fine-tuning, model development, and synthetic-data generation;
5. sector-specific deployments, including (without limitation): financial services and time-series analytics; geospatial, autonomous vehicle, and maritime tracking; motion capture, animation, and biomechanics; neurological, brain-computer interface, and clinical biosignal applications; robotics and industrial automation; video encoding and streaming; wearable health and fitness platforms; extended reality (XR) and spatial computing; symbolic music and score-based applications; bounded line-diagram and sparse-stroke image applications; haptic, tactile, and touch-sensor applications; endogenous visual-form and cognitive-research applications; olfactory receptor-panel research applications; in silico life-sciences research infrastructure (including metabolic-pathway engineering, single-cell analysis, drug-safety falsification, and clinical evidence-packet generation); in silico physical-sciences research infrastructure (including materials discovery, electrochemical and fusion modelling, and adjacent computational pipelines); precision agriculture and crop-genomics research infrastructure; on-device and edge inference platforms; reductive content engineering and adjacent automated-content infrastructure; and any other industry, scope, or technical domain in respect of which a Product is added to the portfolio;
6. custom terms for specific industry, government, or defence deployments, including those subject to export-control, sanctions, or classified-use requirements.

Commercial Licenses for Products covered by this License may, where commercially appropriate, be combined with separate commercial terms covering Products under the Zer0pa Genesis-DM3 Research and Receipt License v1.0, the Zer0pa Gnosis Portfolio Governance Document v1.0, or proprietary-only Zer0pa repositories. The order of precedence between this License and any such combined Commercial License is as set out in Section 18.

---

## 16. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

16.1 **Governing Law.** This License is governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Republic of South Africa, without regard to its conflict of law provisions.

16.2 **Primary Jurisdiction.** Subject to Sections 16.3 and 16.4 below, any dispute arising out of or in connection with this License shall be subject to the jurisdiction of the High Court of South Africa, Gauteng Division, Pretoria.

16.3 **Mutual Right to Interim Relief.** Notwithstanding Sections 16.2 and 16.4, either party may seek urgent, interim, conservatory, or provisional relief from any court of competent jurisdiction worldwide where such relief is necessary to preserve rights pending final resolution of the dispute. Without limiting the foregoing, the Licensor may seek injunctive relief, interim interdicts, temporary restraining orders, preservation orders, or equivalent provisional remedies in any court of competent jurisdiction in relation to alleged infringement, unauthorised Hosted or Managed Service use, breach of Section 4, misuse of Licensor marks, or misuse of the Novel Contributions. The parties agree that a breach of Section 4 (including, without limitation, Sections 4.1, 4.4, and 4.5) may cause irreparable harm to the Licensor for which monetary damages alone would be an inadequate remedy, and the Licensor shall be entitled to seek injunctive relief without being required to demonstrate actual damages or post any bond or security, to the extent permitted by applicable law.

16.4 **International Arbitration.** At the election of either party, any dispute arising out of or in connection with this License that is not subject to a request for interim relief under Section 16.3 may be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration under the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). The arbitral tribunal shall consist of one (1) arbitrator. The seat of arbitration shall be Cape Town, South Africa, unless the parties agree otherwise. The language of the arbitration shall be English. The arbitral award shall be final and binding and may be enforced in any court of competent jurisdiction. The governing law of this License (Section 16.1) shall apply to the substance of any dispute submitted to arbitration.

16.4.1 **Arbitration Election Mechanics.** An election under Section 16.4 must be made by written notice delivered to the other party, and, if court proceedings under Section 16.2 have already been commenced, not later than sixty (60) days after service of the originating court process on the electing party, failing which the right to elect arbitration in respect of that dispute is waived. Upon a timely election under this Section, the parties shall jointly request that the court stay the substantive proceedings pending the outcome of the arbitration, retaining the court's jurisdiction solely for the purposes set out in Section 16.4.2. A dispute referred to arbitration under this Section 16.4 shall not thereafter be re-litigated on the merits in any court.

16.4.2 **Interaction Between Court and Arbitration.** Nothing in Section 16.4 or 16.4.1 limits (i) either party's right under Section 16.3 to seek interim or provisional relief in any court of competent jurisdiction worldwide at any time, whether before, during, or after any arbitration, or (ii) the right of either party to apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to enforce, recognise, confirm, vary, or set aside an arbitral award in accordance with applicable law. Proceedings for such relief do not constitute a waiver of any right to arbitrate the underlying dispute, and the filing of a court application for interim or provisional relief does not, in itself, extinguish the right to elect arbitration under Section 16.4.

16.5 **Severability.** If any provision of this License is held to be unenforceable, such provision shall be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, and the remaining provisions shall continue in full force and effect.

16.6 **Waiver.** The failure of the Licensor to enforce any provision of this License shall not constitute a waiver of such provision or the right to enforce it at a later time. No waiver of any term shall be deemed a continuing waiver or a waiver of any other term. Any waiver must be in writing and signed by the Licensor to be effective.

---

## 17. Assignment

You may not assign or transfer this License, or any rights or obligations hereunder, without the prior written consent of the Licensor. Any attempted assignment without such consent shall be null and void. The Licensor may assign this License, together with all rights and obligations, to any successor entity or acquirer of all or substantially all of the Licensor's relevant intellectual property, provided the assignee assumes all obligations under this License. The Licensor shall publish notice of any such assignment, including the identity of the assignee and the effective date, at the Master Resolver Endpoint as part of the Licensor Identity canonical reference (Section 20.3(e)).

---

## 18. Entire Agreement

18.1 This License constitutes the entire agreement between You and the Licensor with respect to the Software and supersedes all prior agreements, understandings, and communications, whether oral or written, relating to the same subject matter — including, without limitation, the Zer0pa Source-Available License v7.0 (29 April 2026) with respect to versions of the Software released under this License. However, this Section does not supersede or modify any separately executed Commercial License agreement between You (or Your Company) and the Licensor; in the event of any conflict between this License and a Commercial License, the Commercial License shall prevail to the extent of the conflict.

18.2 **Order of Precedence.** Where multiple Zer0pa licensing instruments apply to a counterparty's use of one or more Products (for example, a single counterparty that is a licensee under both this License and the Zer0pa Genesis-DM3 Research and Receipt License v1.0, or under both this License and a Commercial License), the order of precedence between such instruments is, from highest to lowest: (i) any separately executed Commercial License between the parties; (ii) the licence applicable to the specific Product as designated in the Product Register; (iii) this License where it is the licence so designated; (iv) operational documentation as bounded by Section 19. Section 18.1 controls the supersession of prior versions of this License.

---

## 19. License Precedence Over Operational Documentation

19.1 **License Is The Binding Instrument.** The binding legal relationship between You and the Licensor with respect to the Software is governed exclusively by this License and, where applicable, by a separately executed Commercial License. The Licensor publishes operational documentation in support of the Software — including, without limitation, repository READMEs, repository playbooks, release notes, developer guides, code citation indexes, novelty registers, portfolio descriptions, public website copy, marketing materials, scientific communications, and any "project ethos," "positioning," or similar narrative documents (collectively, the "Operational Documentation").

19.2 **Operational Documentation Is Not The License.** Operational Documentation is informational and descriptive. It may evolve continuously in response to engineering, scientific, commercial, or communications needs, and it may be amended, republished, or withdrawn by the Licensor at any time without notice. No change to any Operational Documentation, and no republication, version increment, amendment, or withdrawal of any Operational Documentation, operates as an amendment to this License.

19.3 **Conflict Rule.** In the event of any conflict, inconsistency, ambiguity, or gap between this License and any Operational Documentation, this License prevails. Operational Documentation does not expand, contract, waive, or modify any right, obligation, restriction, grant, remedy, or definition set out in this License. No statement in any Operational Documentation shall be construed as a representation, warranty, covenant, promise, or licence from the Licensor that is not expressly set out in this License or in a separately executed Commercial License.

19.4 **Code Citations and Novelty Schedules.** Notwithstanding Sections 19.1–19.3, code citations referenced by identifier in any Product Novelty Schedule (Section 20.3(g)) form part of this License through the incorporation mechanism in Section 20.3(g), and any resolution of those identifiers against the Licensor's published source repositories through the Citation Index (Section 20.3(b)) is evidentiary rather than constitutive. Changes to repository layout, file naming, or commit hash that affect the resolution of such identifiers do not modify the Novel Contributions identified in the applicable Product Novelty Schedule; in the event of ambiguity, the Novel Contribution as described in the relevant Schedule controls.

19.5 **No Reliance On Extrinsic Materials.** You acknowledge that You have not entered into this License in reliance on any Operational Documentation or on any oral or written statement that is not expressly set out in this License or in a separately executed Commercial License, save in respect of Canonical References expressly incorporated into this License under Section 20.

---

## 20. Canonical References and Master Resolver Endpoint

20.1 **Purpose.** This License is designed so that the specific operational artefacts it depends on can evolve without forcing republication of this License. The mechanism in this Section 20 achieves that by collapsing all mutable operational references into a bounded set of "Canonical References," each of which is maintained by the Licensor at a single "Master Resolver Endpoint." Changes to any Canonical Reference are not amendments to this License. Changes to the substantive terms of this License require publication of a new version.

20.2 **Master Resolver Endpoint.** The "Master Resolver Endpoint" is the single public resource maintained by the Licensor at which the Canonical References listed in Section 20.3 are published or from which they can be resolved. The Master Resolver Endpoint as at the publication date of this License is the URL identified in the header of this License.

20.3 **Canonical References.** The following are the Canonical References under this License:

(a) **Product Register** — the authoritative list of Products covered by this License, and of items in the Licensor's broader portfolio that are governed by alternative licences. The Product Register identifies, for each Product, its name, repository (where public), Product Status (Active, Research in Progress, or Evidenced Negative), and (where applicable) commercial source-clearance status. The Product Register is the dispositive source for whether an item is a Product within the meaning of this License.

(b) **Citation Index** — the resolver by which code-citation identifiers referenced in the Product Novelty Schedules are mapped to the Licensor's published source repositories, commits, files, and lines. The Citation Index is evidentiary under Section 19.4; the Novel Contribution description in the relevant Schedule controls in the event of ambiguity or divergence.

(c) **Trademark Register** — the authoritative list of trademarks, service marks, certification marks, reserved certification-style designations, and other designations claimed or reserved by the Licensor under or in connection with this License. The marks enumerated in Section 12 are a snapshot of the Trademark Register as at the publication date of this License; the Trademark Register at the Master Resolver Endpoint is the live list and shall identify, for each mark, its registration status (registered, unregistered, reserved certification-style, or other) and the jurisdictions of registration where applicable.

(d) **Licensor Contact** — the current email address or equivalent channel at which the Licensor receives Commercial License enquiries and notices under this License.

(e) **Licensor Identity** — the current legal name, domicile, and successor-entity information for the Licensor, to the extent changed from that recorded in the header of this License by reason of corporate reorganisation, assignment under Section 17, or similar event.

(f) **License Date For This Version** — the date on which the Licensor first published this version of the License at the Master Resolver Endpoint, together with the corresponding release tag and content hash for this version.

(g) **Product Novelty Schedules** — the per-Product Schedules incorporated into this License under Section 7. Each Schedule is published by the Licensor at the Master Resolver Endpoint and is expressly incorporated into this License for the sole purpose of describing the Novel Contributions of its Product; the substantive terms of this License (grant scope, restrictions, Revenue Threshold, Hosted or Managed Service Restriction, Change Date mechanics, dispute resolution, and all other operative sections) apply unchanged.

20.4 **Updates Are Not Amendments — and Are Not Retroactive.** The Licensor may update, correct, expand, or retire any Canonical Reference at any time by publishing the update at the Master Resolver Endpoint. No update to a Canonical Reference (a) modifies any substantive term of this License, (b) creates any new right, restriction, or obligation not expressly set out in this License, or (c) requires the Licensor to publish a new version of this License. Without limiting the No Retroactive Expansion rule in Section 7, no update to any Canonical Reference applies retroactively to impose a new restriction, expand a Novel Contribution, alter the scope of a Substantially Similar Implementation, or create a Commercial License requirement for acts occurring before the update was published.

20.5 **Relocation Of The Master Resolver Endpoint.** The Licensor may relocate the Master Resolver Endpoint from time to time. To do so, the Licensor must publish notice of the new Master Resolver Endpoint at the then-current Master Resolver Endpoint, and maintain that notice in a reasonably conspicuous form for a period of not less than ninety (90) days before the relocation takes effect. After the notice period, the new URL becomes the Master Resolver Endpoint for all purposes of this License. If the then-current Master Resolver Endpoint becomes unavailable through no act or omission of the Licensor (including, without limitation, because of the closure or discontinuation of a hosting platform), the Licensor may publish the new Master Resolver Endpoint on any other reasonable public surface — including, without limitation, a Licensor-controlled domain, a public source-code hosting platform under the Licensor's control, or another publicly accessible repository identified through the Licensor's official website or public corporate communications channel — and the relocation takes effect immediately.

20.6 **Effect On Counterparties.** You are entitled to rely on the state of any Canonical Reference at the time of Your relevant act or omission under this License, provided You take reasonable steps to consult the Master Resolver Endpoint at material moments, including, without limitation, prior to accepting this License, prior to distributing the Software or any derivative work, prior to making any claim of compatibility or derivation under Section 4.7, and prior to sending any notice under this License. Reasonable steps may include retaining the relevant release tag, commit hash, archived copy, timestamped download record, package metadata, or other contemporaneous record identifying the Canonical References consulted at the material time. An update published at the Master Resolver Endpoint takes effect prospectively only.

20.7 **Substantive Terms Unchanged By This Section.** Nothing in this Section 20 entitles the Licensor to amend, expand, or modify any substantive term of this License — including, without limitation, the grant of rights, the restrictions on use, the definitions (other than the specific Canonical Reference items identified in Section 20.3), the Novel Contribution descriptions, the Revenue Threshold, the Hosted or Managed Service Restriction, the Change Date mechanics, the anti-circumvention provisions, the dispute resolution provisions, or the governing law — through updates to any Canonical Reference, and no such update shall be construed to have any such effect. A change to a substantive term of this License requires publication of a new version of this License and is subject to the acceptance mechanics in Section 2.

20.8 **Construction.** Where any provision of this License refers to the "Canonical URL," the "Product Register," the list of marks in Section 12, the intake address for Commercial Licenses, or any other reference that is identified in Section 20.3 as a Canonical Reference, that provision is to be construed as referring to the corresponding Canonical Reference at the Master Resolver Endpoint as at the material time, with the text reproduced in this License being an evidentiary snapshot only.

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**Copyright © 2026 Zer0pa (Pty) Ltd. All rights reserved.**
Licensed under the Zer0pa Source-Available License v7.1.
License Date: as published by the Licensor at the Master Resolver Endpoint, together with the corresponding release tag and content hash.
Master Resolver Endpoint (initial): https://github.com/Zer0pa/ZPE-License-Commercial — subject to relocation under Section 20.
