Status
Source available. Not open source.
ORL 1.1 conflicts with the Open Source Definition for multiple independent reasons: a Canopy royalty, an all-licensee competing-offering restriction, and a separate licence for AI Training Use. The other OpenRoots instruments are artifact-specific source-available terms, not software licences seeking OSD status.
The short answer
More than one clause settles it.
The royalty alone prevents approval, but it is not the only conflict.
The licence shall not require a royalty or other fee for sale as a component of an aggregate software distribution.
The Canopy tier requires a royalty of 0.5 percent on attributable revenue once a licensee passes USD 20,000,000. That is a royalty, and it is required. The code instrument fails clause 1 by design. Sections 4 and 6 create additional, independent conflicts with free redistribution and unrestricted fields of endeavour.
Clause by clause
All ten clauses, assessed against ORL 1.1.
The conclusions are conservative: an arguable result is not represented as approval.
| OSD | Clause | Result | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Free Redistribution The licence shall not require a royalty or other fee for sale as a component of an aggregate software distribution. | fails | Section 5 requires a Canopy royalty, and Section 4 restricts commercial redistribution of the Work itself as a substitute. Either prevents unrestricted free redistribution. |
| 2 | Source Code The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. | passes | ORL Section 2.1 grants distribution of source and object forms. This assessment is about the code instrument; the data, model, and agent instruments are not software licences seeking OSD status. |
| 3 | Derived Works The licence must allow modifications and derived works. | arguable | Section 2.1 permits modification and distribution, but Section 4 restricts offering a Derivative Work as a competing substitute. That commercial limitation makes an unqualified pass unsafe. |
| 4 | Integrity of the Author's Source Code A licence may restrict modified-source distribution only through a patch-file mechanism and related naming rules. | passes | ORL does not require patch-only distribution or prohibit distribution of modified source code. |
| 5 | No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The licence must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. | arguable | Natural persons, nonprofits, schools, and governments receive Root status while other entities may be Canopy. Revenue and reseller classifications are economic categories, but a reviewer may still treat the differentiated grant as discrimination among groups. |
| 6 | No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The licence must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. | fails | Section 4 restricts competing commercial services and Section 6 excludes AI Training Use from the base grant. Those are restrictions on uses and commercial fields, even though other fields remain available. |
| 7 | Distribution of License The rights attached must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional licence. | passes | A recipient can exercise the same base rights under the attached ORL text without signing a separate agreement. A separate agreement is required only for uses the base grant excludes, such as a Competing Offering or AI Training Use. |
| 8 | License Must Not Be Specific to a Product Rights must not depend on the program being part of a particular software distribution. | passes | The grant is attached to the Work and does not depend on inclusion in a named distribution or product. |
| 9 | License Must Not Restrict Other Software The licence must not impose restrictions on unrelated software distributed with the licensed program. | passes | Section 4 expressly carves out larger independent products and does not require unrelated software in an aggregate to use ORL terms. |
| 10 | License Must Be Technology-Neutral No provision may depend on a particular interface style or acceptance technology. | passes | ORL does not require click-wrap acceptance, a specific interface, or a particular distribution technology. |
What it is instead
Source available, without an automatic open-source fallback.
The label is the model. There is no hidden Apache, MIT, or Creative Commons conversion clock.
Today
Source available
The source is published, modifiable and usable. Above a revenue threshold, a royalty is owed. Competing resale of the work itself is restricted at every tier.
By time alone
No conversion
No copy becomes Apache, MIT, Creative Commons, or any other fallback licence just because time passed.
Therefore
Fair-code posture
A future version can change terms prospectively, but the current promise is durable source availability with commercial restrictions.
What this blocks
The concrete consequences, not the philosophical ones.
Four effects, each checkable.
No automatic SPDX inclusion
SPDX does not require a licence to be open source, but it does require a separate nomination and review. The current readiness record has 1 blocked criteria.
GPL and AGPL incompatibility
GPL-3.0 section 10 forbids further restrictions. A royalty and a competing-offering restriction are further restrictions. Aggregation is the safer pattern.
Some procurement policies exclude it
An open-source-only procurement policy excludes an OpenRoots dependency. That is an intentional tradeoff, not a wording mistake.
The full compatibility reasoning is on the comparison page, and the certification position is on certification.