OpenRoots Data 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/ord/2.2
- Effective
- 2026-08-27
- Term
- Permanent
- Free below
- USD 20,000,000
You can
- Analyse, query, and publish findings from it
- Redistribute it with the notice intact
- Build derived datasets and label sets
- Use it in academic and internal research
- Benchmark models against it
You must
- Keep provenance records through every derivation
- Preserve subject and contributor rights on redistribution
- Get a Compute licence before training on it
- State clearly which portions you altered
You cannot
- Sell, sublicense, redistribute, port, repackage, or host it as a competing product
- Train a model on it without the Compute licence
- Strip provenance when folding it into a larger corpus
- Re-license derived sets under terms that drop consent
- Re-identify individuals in it
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
How does Section 8.3 interact with the right to erasure?
Propagating a withdrawal of consent through an arbitrarily deep chain of derivative datasets is operationally difficult, and the obligation may exceed what a downstream Licensee can practically perform.
- 02
Does a database right attach separately in the European Union?
The sui generis database right is distinct from copyright and may subsist where copyright does not, which changes what this Licence is capable of granting.
- 03
Do the text and data mining exceptions override Section 6?
The European Union exception permits mining subject to a reservation of rights. Whether Section 6 constitutes an effective reservation in machine-readable form has not been tested.
- 04
Does the no-fallback structure work for data in every jurisdiction?
The current text no longer converts to CC-BY or another public licence. Counsel should test whether permanent source-available data terms interact cleanly with database rights, privacy withdrawals, and text-and-data-mining exceptions.
- 05
Can consent granted by a data subject be inherited by an assignee of the dataset?
Where the Licensor transfers the Work, whether the original basis for processing transfers with it depends on the basis relied upon and on the jurisdiction.
- 06
What is the correct treatment of synthetic records derived from the Work?
A synthetic record generated from the Work may or may not constitute an Extracted Fragment under Section 1.12, and the answer determines whether Section 6.3 disclosure attaches.