OpenRoots Agent License
This is a plain language summary, written to be read. It is not the licence and it carries no legal force. The licence is the legal code, and where the two differ the legal code governs.
- Canonical
- openroots.org/licenses/ora/2.3
- Effective
- 2026-08-27
- Term
- Permanent
- Free below
- USD 20,000,000
You can
- Run it inside your own agent or automation
- Adapt the prompt and the procedure
- Chain it with other skills and servers
- Deploy it for paying clients
- Publish your adaptation
You must
- Keep author attribution inside the skill manifest
- Carry the licence through when you repackage it
- Get a Compute licence before training on the prompt corpus
- Say which model or runtime you validated it against
You cannot
- Sell, sublicense, redistribute, port, repackage, or host it as a competing product
- Sell it as a hosted agent that substitutes for the author's service
- Harvest the prompts into a training set without the Compute licence
- Strip the manifest attribution when bundling
- Present the author as endorsing your deployment
Which tier applies to you.
You do not choose a tier. It follows from your revenue and from what you are doing with the work.
Root
Freeno fee, no reporting
No Canopy royalty or report. The competing-offering, AI-training, provenance, and termination conditions still apply to every licensee.
- Keep the notice, the licence, and the version on every copy
- Do not sell, repackage, host, port, or redistribute the work itself as a competing product
- Disclose when a contribution or bug report was written with AI help
Canopy
0.5%of revenue above the threshold, capped at 250,000 USD per year
The same rights, plus a share of the revenue the work actually produced above the threshold. Only the excess is charged, so crossing the line costs almost nothing and the bill grows with the business rather than arriving whole. Self-reported quarterly in good faith. The rate cannot be negotiated by anyone, so a company adopting today gets the terms the largest adopter already has.
- Everything Root requires
- File a quarterly report and remit 0.5% of attributable revenue above the threshold
- Obtain a separate agreement before offering it as a hosted substitute
Compute
Per runpaid before the training run
Training is not covered by Root or Canopy. Human reading and ordinary search indexing are untouched. Training without this licence sits outside the licence entirely, which makes it infringement rather than a lesser breach of terms.
- Everything your base tier requires
- Pay the Compute Fee before or during the training run
- Carry provenance disclosure on outputs reproducing the work word for word
Where the uncertainty is, named by section.
Six questions counsel has not answered, published with the text and listed by section, so you can see the soft ground before you adopt anything. Most licences carry the same open questions and simply never print them.
- 01
Is a system prompt protected by copyright?
A prompt is functional instruction and may fall below the threshold of originality in some jurisdictions, in which case this Licence operates contractually rather than as a copyright licence.
- 02
Where is the boundary between a skill and its output?
Where a skill materially shapes the text a model produces, whether that output is a Derivative Work of the skill is unresolved and affects what a Licensee may do commercially with it.
- 03
Does Section 4 reach a hosted agent marketplace?
A marketplace that hosts and executes the Work on behalf of buyers may or may not constitute a Competing Offering, depending on whether the buyer is understood to select the Work or to be sold a service.
- 04
How does manifest attribution survive protocol translation?
Where a package is converted between agent formats or protocol versions, the manifest field carrying attribution may have no equivalent in the target format.
- 05
Is prompt-corpus harvesting distinguishable from ordinary use?
An agent runtime necessarily reads the prompt in order to execute it. Distinguishing execution from collection for training purposes is a factual question this Licence addresses only by intent.
- 06
Does the Compute Fee reach a provider that logs prompts by default?
Where a model provider retains submitted prompts and later trains on them, the Licensee may have caused a Corpus Inclusion without intending one, and the allocation of responsibility is unclear.