Comparison
Every dimension here is a specific failure some licence is known for, scored the same way for all thirteen, ours included. The table is the argument, and the known failure of each licence is printed beside it.
4 dimensions where OpenRoots scores full and every one of the other twelve licences does not.
Treats AI training as distinct
Most established general-purpose software licences do not address model training expressly, leaving classification to copyright law, contract doctrine, and statutory exceptions.
Requires output provenance
Attribution stripped by the training pipeline is the specific harm alleged against Copilot.
Protects adopters from trademark leverage
WP Engine paid, then got a five hour ultimatum and lost infrastructure access.
Covers more than source code
Code was never the only protected artifact, and none of the established families in this comparison supplies matching terms for all four.
ORL 1.1 meets 11 of 11 dimensions. ELv2 is the closest of the rest at 6.5.
Permissive, copyleft, source-available, content, and open-weight licences scored on the same thirteen questions. Each question exists because a specific thing went wrong in public.
| Dimension | ORL 1.12026 | MIT1988 | Apache-2.02004 | GPL-3.02007 | AGPL-3.02007 | MPL-2.02012 | BSL-1.12017 | SSPL2018 | ELv22021 | FSL2023 | Post-Open2024 | CC-BY-4.02013 | Llama2023 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free for small usersCan an individual or small company use it commercially at no cost? | |||||||||||||
| Checks the hyperscalerDoes it stop a large cloud reselling the work as a hosted substitute? | |||||||||||||
| Restriction stays narrowIs the commercial restriction scoped to substitution rather than the whole stack? | |||||||||||||
| Commercial protection is durableDoes its commercial-protection rule remain in force instead of expiring into a permissive licence? | |||||||||||||
| Published text is immutableCan a published version be changed in place after adoption? | |||||||||||||
| Treats AI training as distinctIs training a model on the work a separately licensed act? | |||||||||||||
| Requires output provenanceMust a licensed model disclose when its output reproduces the work? | |||||||||||||
| Protects adopters from trademark leverageIs a paying adopter guaranteed the right to say what it is built on? | |||||||||||||
| Terms are never negotiatedIs every adopter on identical terms with no side letters? | |||||||||||||
| Price is predictable and cappedIf money is owed, is the amount flat, capped, and knowable in advance? | |||||||||||||
| Covers more than source codeAre datasets, model weights, and agent skills covered by matching instruments? | |||||||||||||
| Dimensions met | 11 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 6.5 | 5.5 | 5 | 5.5 | 4.5 |
The dimensions were not chosen to make one licence win. Each one is the question a specific public failure raised and left unanswered.
Including the failure each one is remembered for. Ours is listed with the same treatment, because a licence with no track record has to say so.
MIT
The shortest useful licence ever written. Do anything, keep the notice, expect nothing.
Where it failed. Amazon and others built managed services on MIT and Apache work and returned nothing. The licence permits it by design.
Apache Software Foundation
MIT plus an explicit patent grant, patent retaliation, and a trademark disclaimer. The corporate default.
Where it failed. Same strip-mining exposure as MIT. Its trademark clause disclaims a grant rather than guaranteeing adopters anything.
Free Software Foundation
Share-alike copyleft. Distribute a derivative and you must distribute the source under the same terms.
Where it failed. Copyleft never triggers for a hosted service, which is the whole reason AGPL exists. Training is untouched.
Free Software Foundation
GPL extended across the network boundary. Run it as a service and users are entitled to the source.
Where it failed. Many enterprises ban it outright, so it protects the work by shrinking its audience. Redis returned to it in 2025 after Valkey had already won.
Mozilla
File-level copyleft. Modified files stay open, the rest of your product does not have to.
Where it failed. The middle path leaves the hosted-substitute problem entirely unaddressed.
MariaDB
Source-available with a change date. After the stated period each version converts to an open licence.
Where it failed. The licensor sets the additional use grant and the change date per release. HashiCorp adopted it in 2023 and Terraform was forked as OpenTofu within weeks.
MongoDB
Offer it as a service and you must release the entire service stack under SSPL.
Where it failed. Rejected by Debian, Red Hat, and Fedora. The definition reached into unrelated software, so ordinary adopters paid for a clause aimed at hyperscalers.
Elastic
Free to use except as a managed service, and you may not circumvent the licence key.
Where it failed. AWS forked Elasticsearch as OpenSearch. Elastic added AGPL back in 2024, three years after leaving open source.
Sentry
Fair Source. Two year delayed conversion to Apache 2.0 or MIT, with a competing-use restriction until then.
Where it failed. The closest thing to a delayed-open standard, but corporate legal treats an unfamiliar text as a bespoke contract and reviews it as one.
Bruce Perens
Free for individuals and small companies, paid for large ones, with revenue pooled and redistributed to maintainers.
Where it failed. Stalled at draft. The revenue share needs collection infrastructure no single project can build, which is the collective action problem it names itself.
Creative Commons
The standard for content and data. Attribution required, everything else permitted.
Where it failed. Creative Commons published guidance in 2025 acknowledging CC licences were not written for AI training, and started CC Signals as a separate answer.
Meta
Weights downloadable and usable commercially, subject to a monthly active user ceiling and an acceptable use policy.
Where it failed. It fails several tests of an open licence on freedom of use, user discrimination, and field of endeavour. Newer versions added a regional exclusion.
OpenRoots
Free below the threshold, twenty million by default. Flat capped royalty above it. Training licensed separately. Competing resale, sublicensing, redistribution, porting, repackaging, and hosted substitution require a separate agreement.
Where it loses. Unproven. No adoption, no litigation history, and six open legal questions published alongside the text rather than resolved.
Compatibility
Direction changes the answer. In means their work entering yours, out means yours entering theirs, and the two are rarely the same verdict. Open a row for the mechanism, then follow through to the full analysis for the clause that produces it.
Copyleft conflicts do not resolve by time alone under current OpenRoots terms. A combined derivative with GPL or AGPL remains blocked unless a separate relicensing path exists.
Full analysis, one page per licence