OpenRoots 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/orl/2.2
- Effective
- 2026-08-27
- Term
- Permanent
- Free below
- USD 20,000,000
You can
- Use it for anything, including making money
- Read, modify, and fork it
- Ship it inside your own product
- Redistribute it, modified or not
- Run it in production
- Sell services and support around it
You must
- Keep the notice, licence, and version on every copy
- Pay the Canopy royalty above the revenue threshold
- Get a Compute licence before training any model on it
- Disclose AI assistance on contributions and bug reports
You cannot
- Sell, sublicense, redistribute, port, repackage, or host it as a competing product
- Train a model on it without the Compute licence
- Use the author's trademarks beyond honest attribution
- Sue over patents and keep your patent rights
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
Does Section 6 hold as infringement, or only as breach of contract?
Removing AI Training Use from the base grant is intended to place an unlicensed training run outside the licence entirely. Whether a court treats that as copyright infringement or as a contractual breach materially changes the available remedies, and the answer differs by jurisdiction.
- 02
Does the all-licensee Competing Offering restriction stay narrow enough?
Section 4 now binds Root and Canopy licensees. The intended boundary is Commons Clause style substitution, not ordinary commercial use inside a larger independent product. Counsel should test whether the definition and carve-outs make that boundary enforceable without chilling legitimate adoption.
- 03
Does a pooled Clearinghouse create tax or securities exposure?
Where a shared collecting body pools royalties across multiple projects and redistributes them, the structure may attract regulatory treatment that a single-project arrangement would not.
- 04
Is Section 11.2 drafted narrowly enough to survive a trademark dispute?
The clause grants an irrevocable nominative fair use right. Trademark law generally resists irrevocable grants, and the interaction between a contractual promise and a later assignee of the mark is uncertain.
- 05
Is the Compute Fee enforceable outside United States copyright law?
The text-and-data-mining exceptions in the European Union and the United Kingdom, and the reservation mechanisms attached to them, may interact with Section 6 differently than United States law does.
- 06
Should the competing-offering restriction bind Root Licensees as well?
Section 4 currently binds every Licensee, not only Canopy Licensees. Narrowing it to Canopy would widen the free tier considerably, and widening it further would reach uses the Root tier is meant to permit.