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The main problem

The main problem

Posted Aug 22, 2026 3:40 UTC (Sat) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
Parent article: Considering the OpenMDW license

> Fontana suggested restricting the termination to just the model weights at issue in this case.

I did, but this had more to do with my OSD 9 concern, which I don't see as the main problem with this license. Rather, the main problem is the one that is suggested by the reported comments of Eric Schultz and Kevin Fleming. I put it this way (https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lis...):

"This license can be seen as discriminating against a class of
potential licensees that include *open source developers*, that is to
say, human licensors of OSI-approved licenses applied to code, who
might seek to bring claims enforcing their rights against the releaser
of an OpenMDW-1.1-licensed LLM on the theory that the model or its
output breaches the OSI-approved license. I feel that gets at what is
troubling to me about this defensive termination provision. If the OSI
were to approve this license, wouldn't the perceived message be that
OSI is siding against licensors of OSI-approved licenses seeking to
pursue what those licensors believe are legitimate claims of copyright
infringement (and/or open source license breach)? As far as I am aware
no previous license submitted for OSI approval has raised an issue
remotely similar to this. . . .
While tactics and strategies around enforcement of open source licenses has
certainly been a controversial issue in open source, as a baseline
matter there has never been a view in the general community that
good-faith enforcement of open source licenses through pursuit of
copyright claims or similar is bad or problematic per se."

It's true that a carveout for "good faith copyright claims" would be unworkable, but it seems to me you could at least carve out enforcement of claims based on some theory of breach of an OSI-approved open source license.

I can understand why the defensive termination feature is attractive to some model publishers, but the optics are not good.


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