Who we are
A licence registry, and where it currently stands.
OpenRoots publishes and stewards four source-available licences. This page states who writes them, how decisions get made, and what has not been done yet. Anyone deciding whether to depend on an instrument is entitled to all three before they read a clause.
- Instruments
- 4
- Clauses stewarded
- 519
- Open questions
- 24
- Governance
- Committee
Why this exists
It started with a group of people comparing notes on the same bad year.
The developers who started OpenRoots had each watched their own work carry somebody else's revenue. Nothing was stolen. Each of those companies was doing exactly what the licence permitted, which is the part that stung. A permissive licence had done precisely what it promised, and the promise turned out to be the wrong one to have made.
The stories had the same shape every time. The work was good. The licence was the wrong instrument. And there was nothing on the shelf that sat between giving it all away and locking it behind a sales call. So they wrote the thing that was missing instead of complaining about its absence.
The committee is software developers, and that is deliberate. The people setting the terms ship the artifacts those terms govern, so a clause that is unworkable in practice gets caught by somebody who would have to live with it. A small board sits alongside for the decisions that are not engineering decisions, which is naming, the trademark position, and how review is run.
Where the project actually stands.
A committee, and a small board. The instruments are written by working software developers, because the people setting the terms should ship the kind of artifacts those terms govern. The board handles what is not an engineering decision, which is naming, the trademark position, and how review is run. It is a young registry with a narrow mandate, and it is described that way rather than dressed in institutional language.
No counsel review yet. Every instrument publishes six questions a lawyer has not answered. They are attached to each licence text and listed by section. They are why no instrument is described as finished.
No third-party adoption to point at. Public use is currently first-party and several repositories still carry superseded 1.0 terms. Nothing has been tested by litigation or at scale. A licence without an independent track record remains a hypothesis.
Source-available, not open source. Clause 1 of the Open Source Definition forbids requiring a royalty. The Canopy tier requires one. That is definitional rather than a drafting problem, and the comparison page states it in the same table as everything else.
7 principles the instruments are drafted against.
- 01
One fixed base text
Each instrument is adopted word for word, the way MIT and Apache are. The published threshold, rate and cap are never privately renegotiated, so the terms you read are the terms everyone got. Sections 4 and 6 still require separate written licences for competing commercialization and AI Training Use, because pretending every commercial arrangement is identical would be its own kind of dishonesty.
- 02
The terms you adopt are permanent
Current releases do not convert to Apache, MIT, Creative Commons or anything else once enough time has passed. A future version can change future terms. The version attached to your release stays attached to your release.
- 03
Free where it matters most
Below the revenue threshold the grant is royalty-free, with no industry, geography or user-count ceiling. Competition, training, attribution and termination terms apply at every tier, and those are exactly what allow the free tier to stay free.
- 04
Training is a separate act
Using a work and training a model on it are different things, and pretending otherwise is how attribution disappeared from an entire generation of generated output. Training is licensed separately or it is not licensed at all.
- 05
You can see where the uncertainty is
Every instrument ships with the questions counsel has not yet answered attached to the text and listed by section. Most licences carry the same open questions and never print them. Knowing where the soft ground sits is worth more than a confident silence.
- 06
Nothing published is ever edited
A correction ships as a new version. Every earlier version stays reachable at its canonical address permanently, because somebody has already relied on it.
- 07
No hidden collection
Funding terms belong in the licence and optional support belongs in public documentation. OpenRoots tooling never hides identity, sponsorship or usage collection inside a generated artifact, because a commercial goal does not replace informed consent.
How a version reaches publication.
Publication freezes the bytes and publishes the unresolved questions. External counsel has not reviewed the current text; a later correction must be a new version.
- 01
Drafting
A licence is written against named, sourced failures rather than principles. Every clause has to point at something that already went wrong in public.
- 02
Internal adversarial review
The draft is attacked from four positions before publication: adopter, commercial licensee, maintainer, and hostile sceptic. This is structured review, not external legal counsel.
- 03Now
Publication
The text is published with a digest and its unanswered legal questions. Publication freezes the bytes; it does not imply counsel approval or remove the disclosed legal risk.
- 04
Public review
Comments, objections, and steward responses are recorded against the published version. An accepted correction can only appear in a new numbered version.
- 05
External counsel
External legal review remains outstanding. If counsel identifies a defect, the published text stays frozen and the correction ships as a later version.
Using the name
The text is free to adopt. The name is not free to place on a different text.
Trademark policy