The ALIS Pact

This is not a license. It is the social contract between the people who build ALIS and the people who play, host, and extend it. The operative legal terms live only in LICENSE.

What ALIS Is

ALIS is an open game architecture that teaches real skills through gameplay, simulates survival, and connects people around shared values. The technology must remain understandable and survivable beyond any one maintainer. The official world and identity must remain coherent enough to sustain the project.

Commitments

To players

• No pay-to-win or predatory mechanics.
• Monetization serves the game rather than exploiting players.
• Privacy is the default.
• Community servers and independently branded forks are welcome.

To contributors

• Accepted work is credited and never silently absorbed.
• Contribution rules remain public and understandable.
• Maintainers and contributors work under the same published rules.
• License-policy changes are public, reviewable, and never retroactive.

To the ecosystem

• UE-facing source uses reciprocity that does not attempt to relicense Unreal.
• Separate hosted services use network reciprocity.
• Protocols remain permissive so independent implementations can survive.
• Public reusable assets permit commercial development with attribution.
• Third-party rights and data provenance remain visible.
• Covered improvements remain available to recipients or service users when the applicable component license requires it.

To the project

• ALIS sustains itself through official services, releases, private hero content, and brand identity rather than locking down shared foundations.
• Trademarks distinguish the official project without blocking truthful references or independently branded forks.
• Canonical data and build recipes remain reproducible where upstream terms permit it.
• The project adapts openly when technology or dependency terms change.

Public Survivability Floor

Private official layers must remain optional. Before ALIS depends on them for a public playable release, the public foundation must provide:

• client and community-server source;
• open protocols and canonical schemas;
• the world compiler, deterministic generation rules, and source-fetch recipes;
• at least one redistributable reference asset set and playable reference region; and
• fallback discovery and self-hosting documentation.

This is a release target, not a claim that the current prototype already satisfies every item.

What We Ask in Return

• Preserve source rights required by the component you use.
• Respect upstream licenses and do not hide provenance.
• Respect the ALIS identity and clearly distinguish forks.
• Contribute improvements upstream when practical, while recognizing that copyleft guarantees source availability rather than a mandatory pull request.
• Keep the ecosystem usable by the people who come after us.

Governance

ALIS is maintained by its project stewards. Governance should expand with the community and keep component licensing, contribution rights, and release decisions visible in version control.