diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 3c929ee..03aa4f1 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -1,62 +1,63 @@ # Provenance -**Your family, traced.** +**Where it came from matters.** -Provenance is open-source genealogy software for people who want to do this right. Build your family tree, gather the documents, link the sources, and pass it all down in a format that will outlive any subscription, any company, any platform. +Provenance is self-hostable software for tracing where you come from — your family *and* your land. Build a family tree, document every claim with real sources, reconstruct the chain of ownership behind a piece of property, and keep all of it in a format you control, on infrastructure you run. -Your history shouldn't live behind a paywall. Your data shouldn't be a product. The story of where you came from belongs to you — and to whoever comes after. +Your history shouldn't live behind a subscription. Your data shouldn't be someone else's product. The story of where you came from belongs to you — and to whoever comes after. --- ## Why "Provenance" -Museums use the word for the chain of custody behind an object: where it came from, who held it, how it got here. A painting without provenance is just a painting. A painting *with* provenance is a story. +Museums and collectors use the word for the chain of custody behind an object: where it came from, who held it, how it got here. A painting without provenance is just a painting. A painting *with* provenance is a story. -Families work the same way. A name on a tree is just a name. A name with sources, photos, letters, and the small details of a life — that's a person. That's provenance. +People and land work the same way. A name on a tree is just a name. A name with sources, photos, letters, and the small details of a life — that's a person. A parcel of farmland traced from its original federal patent through every deed and heir to the present day — that's a story too. Provenance treats both as facets of the same thing. -We built this software around that idea. Every fact links to its source. Every claim can be traced. Nothing is just asserted; everything is shown. +Every fact links to its source. Every claim can be traced. Nothing is just asserted; everything is shown. ## What it does -- **Build a tree that actually holds up.** Add people, relationships, events, and places. Link every fact to the document, photo, or record it came from. When your cousin asks "how do we know Great-Grandma was born in Trieste?" — you can show them. -- **Bring your own archive.** Drop in scans, PDFs, audio recordings of your grandmother, the photo album your uncle finally digitized. Provenance treats them as first-class citizens, not attachments. -- **Standards over silos.** Full GEDCOM 7 import and export. Your data is yours, in a format every other genealogy tool can read. Migrate in, migrate out, fork the project — it's all the same to us. -- **Run it your way.** Self-host on a home server, run it locally on your laptop, or deploy it for your whole extended family. No accounts required. No telemetry. No "premium tier." -- **Collaborate without the platform.** Share a tree with relatives via a link, a local network, or a synced folder. Merge contributions. Resolve conflicts. The family historian role is finally something more than one person typing alone. +- **Build a tree that holds up.** People, relationships, events, and places — with every fact linked to the document, photo, or record it came from. +- **Trace the land, not just the family.** Properties are first-class. Record ownership events (grants, deeds, inheritances, sales), reconstruct chain-of-title, and tie parcels to the people who held them. +- **Bring your own archive.** Scans, PDFs, photos, audio recordings — first-class citizens, not afterthoughts. +- **A research assistant that proposes, never overwrites.** The built-in AI assistant searches legal sources, lays out what it found, and waits for your approval before anything touches your data. You can point it at the major model providers or a self-hosted model — your keys, your choice. +- **Standards over silos.** Full GEDCOM 7 import and export. Migrate in, migrate out. +- **Privacy you control.** Public, unlisted, or private per tree; any individual can be hidden; living people are protected by default. +- **Find your people.** When another user's tree overlaps with yours, Provenance can surface an anonymous "possible match" — and only connects you if you both say yes. +- **Run it your way.** Container-native. Self-host behind Caddy and, if you like, a Cloudflare Tunnel. Multi-tenant, so your whole extended family — or a whole community of strangers — can coexist on one deployment. ## Who it's for -- The person in their family who became the keeper of the photos after a parent passed +- The person who became the keeper of the photos after a parent passed +- Farm and rural families tracing land back to the original patent - Researchers who want their citations to actually mean something - Adoptees and donor-conceived people piecing together a fuller picture -- Diaspora families reconnecting branches across continents -- Anyone who looked at the big genealogy subscriptions and thought *I don't want my family tree to be someone else's recurring revenue* +- Anyone who looked at the big genealogy subscriptions and thought *I don't want my family history to be someone else's recurring revenue* ## Principles -- **Your data is yours.** Plain files. Open formats. Export anytime. Delete anytime. We mean it because we can't do anything else — there's no server of ours holding it. -- **Sources or it didn't happen.** Every fact can carry citations. The tree records what you know *and* how you know it. -- **Built to outlast us.** Open source, permissively licensed, designed so a determined cousin in 2075 can still open your files and read them. -- **Honest about hard things.** Families include adoption, estrangement, complicated parentage, name changes, and people who don't want to be on a tree. Provenance treats those as normal, not edge cases. -- **No dark patterns.** No hint matches dangling behind a paywall. No surprise DNA upsell. No emails about "you have new ancestors waiting." +- **Your data is yours.** Open formats. Export anytime. Self-host anywhere. +- **Sources or it didn't happen.** Every fact can carry citations. The record holds what you know *and* how you know it. +- **The assistant serves you.** AI proposes; you decide. No autonomous writes, ever. +- **Honest about hard things.** Adoption, estrangement, complicated parentage, name changes, people who don't want to be on a tree — treated as normal, not edge cases. +- **No dark patterns.** No paywalled hints. No surprise upsells. No "you have new ancestors waiting" emails. -## Get started +## Licensing -```sh -git clone https://git.jpaul.io/justin/provenance -cd provenance -./provenance init -``` +Provenance is **source-available**, not open source (yet). It is licensed under the [Business Source License 1.1](LICENSE): -Or download a release build for macOS, Windows, or Linux. *(Coming soon.)* +- **Free forever for personal, family, and non-commercial use** — self-host all you like. +- **Commercial hosting for a fee is not permitted** without a separate license from the author. +- **Each release converts to AGPL-3.0** (a true open-source license) four years after it ships. + +In plain terms: run it for yourself, your family, or your community at no cost, forever. You just can't take this code and sell it as a hosted service — that's reserved for a possible future first-party offering. See [LICENSE](LICENSE) for the exact terms. ## Status -Early days. The project is in active design and the codebase is forming. If the principles above resonate with you, watch the repo, open an issue with your use case, or reach out. +Early and moving fast. The product is being built in the open, commit by commit, and stood up in a live home lab as it goes. See [docs/PRD.md](docs/PRD.md) for the product requirements and roadmap. -## License - -[MIT](LICENSE) +If the principles above resonate, watch the repo, open an issue with your use case, or pitch in. See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md). ---