Open Ownership Software Licence
A licence, and an ownership model to go with it. The software belongs to a society that owns itself. Everyone who runs it pays something toward keeping it alive. Everyone who uses it can become a full member and help govern it.
Nobody can buy it, because there is nothing to buy.
In design. The first project to adopt it will be Kanecta.
Permissive licensing is a genuinely beautiful thing, and this is not a rejection of it lightly made. But three problems keep coming back.
Give code away with no conditions and it tends to end up steered by whoever has the most capital to spend on it. A well-funded rival can always out-build you at giving your own work away, and once the ecosystem follows them, the project is theirs in every sense that matters — whatever the licence file still says.
AI has changed the arithmetic. Each new model release can surface a large number of genuine bugs in a large codebase very quickly, and answering at that speed takes a paid, AI-assisted team. Unpaid evening-and-weekend maintenance cannot keep up, and it is not fair to ask it to. Software this era needs a way to fund its own upkeep.
Co-operatives, foundations, mission-driven companies — the pattern repeats. Something is built carefully by people who believe in it, and then one day it has an owner who does not. Any structure where control can be bought will, eventually, be bought.
The mechanics, as currently designed.
A tiered base fee by kind of entity, plus a usage fee that scales with how much of the software's capability you expose and whether you make money from it. Low income or genuine inability to pay is an exception you can claim with proof — not a loophole, and not a humiliation.
The fee lands on whoever deploys and operates an instance, not on the people using it. No chasing individual end users, ever.
People using a hosted instance have the right — and must be actively given the opportunity — to become full members of the society and to read the source. An operator who would rather keep their users out of that pays a higher commercial fee instead. Participation is the default path; exclusion is the thing you have to pay for.
The society may disregard shell companies and tax-haven arrangements and treat the real beneficial party as liable. The paper entity does not get the last word on who is actually using the software.
You assess and report what you owe. Backed by audit rights over a portion of cases, public disclosure where someone is plainly dishonest, and cure periods before anything harsher. Suspending a licence is the last resort, not the first move.
After a set number of years, the licence terms lapse and that version of the software reverts to plain MIT. A built-in exit ramp, so the code is not tied to one organisation forever on the assumption that the organisation stays good.
A New Zealand incorporated society under the Incorporated Societies Act 2022 — a legal entity that owns itself. No shares, no profit distribution to members, international membership allowed, and free to employ people at ordinary market wages.
A worker board for day-to-day operations, a member board for the people who use the software, and a custodian board — the only one not chosen by lot.
The worker and member boards are filled by sortition rather than election, so a seat is something you can be called to rather than something a campaign can win.
The custodian board is drawn from people who have shown deep, sustained commitment over time. It can block constitutional and cultural breaches — underpaying workers, taking excess profit, any attempt to sell the organisation — and that is all it can do. It cannot set direction or initiate proposals, and members can recall individual custodians who abuse the veto.
No buy-in, no fee to join, no admission committee. Nobody inside has any reason to keep anybody else out. Members can be expelled for routinely abusing the rules, but expulsion is time-limited and reversible.
No dividends, no capital accounts, no growing stake. The only way to earn money from the society is to do actual work for it, for hours, at a fair wage. There is nothing to hoard.
A citizens'-initiated-referendum mechanism, so changes can come from the membership rather than only from the boards — paired with an information channel independent enough that members are not simply voting on whatever they have been told.
Anything under the OOSL can never be sold. Not the software, not the society, not by a future board that has convinced itself the offer is too good to refuse. Everything else here is a design in progress and open to argument. That part is the point of the exercise.
The OOSL is being designed, not launched. The licence text and the society's constitution are both still unwritten, and both will need a New Zealand lawyer before they mean anything. Several questions are genuinely open — including how the MIT tail holds up in an era where code can be re-implemented quickly by AI, and how much a single-jurisdiction society can really protect a project from a determined government.
It is being worked out in the open because a governance model written behind closed doors would be a poor advertisement for itself.
The OOSL is being developed alongside Kanecta, which will be the first software released under it.