CustomPOS and its family (Open Books, training mode, and the sponsored civic work). Written July 2026, deliberately before anyone was asking — because a list like this is easy to write when nothing is at stake and politically impossible to write after success arrives. If you are reading this because the project got big: this document predates the temptation, and that is the point. Hold us to it.
Free stays free. The software, every vertical template, the training system, and the operations knowledge that ships with it. No paid tiers, no premium features, no "community edition" bait with an enterprise upsell behind it. The project's costs are covered by its sponsor and by an optional, disclosed payment-processing referral — and that referral's economics are published, not buried in a margin.
No promises with clocks in them. No SLAs, no uptime guarantees, no support contracts, no enterprise deals, no commitments that make anyone's emergency into our emergency. This software is built to degrade softly and be maintained lightly — by design, so that it can stay free and its builder can stay sane. If your business requires guaranteed response times, this is honestly the wrong tool, and we'd rather say so here than fail you later.
No ads, no selling data, no monetizing attention. The register is not a surveillance device and its users are not inventory.
Ledgers get lit; persons stay dark. Institutional and business transparency is the mission; individual human beings keep their privacy. No feature will ever publish an identifiable person's wages, purchases, debts, votes, or finances without that person choosing it for themselves. The platform never discloses your answer; you may choose to sign it publicly, petition-style, and un-choose it at any time. What is forbidden forever is the platform — or anyone else — publishing a person's data over their head. Aggregation floors are code, not settings. (One group stands apart: people who hold or seek elected office. The money filings the law makes them file, and their votes as members of a public body, are public record. See "The civic work" below. Their secret ballots as voters stay as dark as anyone's.)
(Amendment, added when the public-signature feature shipped, per this file's own rule that changes be written down in public with the reasoning shown: the original line read "…debts, votes, or finances." The qualifier was added because residents asked to be able to sign their own answers by name, like a petition. The distinction that matters and that we hold to is direction and consent — the light points at ledgers and institutions, and points at a person only when that person turns it on themselves.)
Transparency is voluntary for humans, structural for institutions. Open Books will never default to public, never be a condition of using the software, and never become a tool for anyone to demand another person's disclosure — an employer of a worker, a landlord of a tenant. The direction of the light matters: it points at ledgers and institutions, never down at people.
No competitor data circles. Shops that publish do so one-way, to the general public. The platform will never build private benchmarking or data-sharing between identifiable competitors — public disclosure is pro-competitive; private exchange between rivals is where collusion lives, and we will not host it.
Provenance over theater. Published figures render from the operating system that produced them — numbers that fall out of the till, not out of marketing. The project will never add features that let a shop curate a prettier public picture than its own register knows: no manual overrides of published totals, no deleting history. Corrections and true-ups are displayed with their deltas, never overwritten.
No sides in a race — and the shield is for staff, not for officeholders. The sponsored civic platform computes and cites; it never advocates, never endorses, never displays official endorsements, and never becomes anyone's campaign or opposition infrastructure. It never runs a resident vote on who should win a race, or on a measure already on a ballot.
People who hold or seek elected office asked for public power, so the light reaches them. The platform may name them; show who is on the ballot and how each member voted; publish everything the law requires them to file about their money (financial-interest statements, campaign contribution and expenditure reports); and host residents' questions and priorities about their conduct in office. Every candidate in a race gets the same treatment: the same facts, the same format, in alphabetical order, and a filing gathered for one is sought for all. A record not yet in hand is shown as "not gathered yet" for each candidate alike, never only for one.
Non-elected government employees are never named or singled out. No conduct posts about them, and no pay or records tied to their names. Their work is answered for by the elected people who direct it. These lines tighten, not loosen, in election seasons.
(Amendment, October 2026, written down here before the code changed, per this file's own rule. The original line read: "No candidates, no ballot measures, no named individuals — ever. The sponsored civic platform computes and cites; it never advocates, never endorses, never displays official endorsements, and never becomes opposition infrastructure. These lines tighten, not loosen, in election seasons." The reasoning: a voter can't weigh a race the platform won't name, and the money trail stops short if it can't reach the people who vote the money. The protection was meant for people who never asked for public power. That is non-elected staff and private residents, who stay covered by "Ledgers get lit; persons stay dark" above. It was never meant for those who did ask for it. Neutrality between candidates, and the bar on running votes on races and live ballot measures, are unchanged.)
The builder is not the product. If attention arrives, the artifacts speak and the pitch gets declined — the same doctrine applied to county judges and to journalists alike: deliver results, ask for nothing, stay at the counter most mornings. No growth obligation, no roadmap owed to anyone, no version of success that requires the founder to become necessary rather than less necessary.
Success is capability, then release. The project is finished when it is capable of its target, not when it has captured a market. If a better steward — a community, a co-op, even a government — someday absorbs this work and makes it standard, that is the win condition, not a loss.
Changes to this file require the same thing the file itself required: writing it down in public, before acting on it, with the reasoning shown. Silence is not amendment.