OpenRoots

ORD-2.2

A side business contributing back, under ORD 2.2

A sole trader or small partnership earning under six figures from the work. Sending a patch, an issue, or a defect report upstream. This resolves to the Root tier.

Tier

Root

Owed

Nothing. No fee, no report, no filing.

Sections in play

1.7, 2.1, 2.2, 8.2

Who and what

The situation being resolved.

Actor

A side business

A sole trader or small partnership earning under six figures from the work.

under 100k USD

Situation

Contributing back

Sending a patch, an issue, or a defect report upstream.

Rulings

3 questions resolved against the text.

clear

Which tier applies?

Root. A sole trader or small partnership earning under six figures from the work. Below $20,000,000 in trailing revenue, or within an exempt category, no Canopy royalty applies. Sections 4, 6, 8, and 10 still bind every Licensee.

Sections 1.7, 2.1, 2.2

clear

Is anything owed?

Nothing. No fee, no report, no filing.

Sections 2.1

clear

What must a contribution disclose?

That it is your own work, or is appropriately licensed and identified as such, or was produced with the assistance of an AI tool and which tool. Section 8.2 extends this to issues and defect reports, not only code, because the volume problem maintainers face is reports rather than patches.

Sections 8.2

Cautions

What this situation gets wrong most often.

  • Revenue is measured across entities under common control, per Section 1.4. A parent company above the threshold makes its subsidiary a Canopy Licensee regardless of that subsidiary's own turnover.

  • Section 8.3 of ORD requires a withdrawal of consent to propagate to any derivative you have distributed. Whether that is operationally achievable at depth is a published open question.

Same actor

Other situations for this party.