[License-discuss] [DISCUSSION] AIAL v2 (was AI-MIT) discussion — permissive license + provenance declarations + limited no-claim framework

[Shuji Sado]

Nik-san,

Your three questions are not unreasonable, but I think there are more
fundamental issues before reaching them.

This revision does seem to reduce or soften some of the fatal concerns in
the earlier version. However, I still find it very difficult to see this as
a viable candidate for OSI approval. A number of definitions remain
unclear, and the legal mechanism itself still appears unstable.
More fundamentally, I am not yet convinced that this needs to be a new
license at all.

What you seem to be trying to achieve may be better implemented through an
MIT or Apache-style permissive license, accompanied by a separate
provenance convention and, where expressly chosen, a contributor-side
no-claim or non-assertion statement.

I do not deny that such a framework could still raise separate OSI
questions. But at least as a matter of legal design, that approach seems
materially safer and simpler than embedding these ideas into a new
standalone license.

So, to me, the more important question comes before how to structure the
provenance syntax. It is whether this really needs to be a new license for
OSI review in the first place.

Shuji

2026/3/29 0:14 Nik <nik.sharky at gmail.com>:

> Hello all,
>
> Thank you to everyone who commented on the earlier AI-MIT / AIAL
> submission and the subsequent discussion.
>
> I decided to start from scratch in a new thread to make it clear.
> Updated repo with current docs:
> https://github.com/aicrafted/AI-Attribution-License
> New edition of license text, provenance and faq also attached to letter.
>
> IMO the most important points from the previous thread were:
> 1. The original AI-MIT name was not appropriate and created avoidable
> confusion.
> 2. A single project-level authorship declaration is not sufficient for
> real repositories.
> 3. Per-file or per-artifact provenance may be useful as documentation, but
> it should not be treated as a conclusive legal determination.
> 4. The earlier draft also relied too heavily on hypothetical SPDX
> evolution.
> 5. The concept needs a cleaner separation between provenance disclosure
> and legal effect.
>
> Based on that feedback, considering a narrower v2 direction:
>
> - A conservative permissive license core, intentionally close in spirit to
> MIT/ISC
> - An optional provenance declaration layer, used as documentation and
> contributor representation
> - An optional contributor-limited no-claim / covenant layer for
> specifically declared generated-origin contributions
> - An explicit rule that provenance declarations:
>   - do not determine legal status by themselves
>   - do not negate third-party or unknown rights
>   - do not expand permissions beyond the declaring contributor’s own rights
>
> In other words, the revised direction is not a license that decides
> whether AI-generated code is public domain but rather: a permissive license
> framework that allows provenance-aware disclosure and, where expressly
> chosen, a contributor-limited no-claim posture, without pretending to
> conclusively resolve unsettled authorship law.
>
> At this point, I would like to focus on questions:
> 1. Is it preferable to keep provenance syntax entirely in a separate
> specification, rather than trying to embed those semantics directly in the
> license text
> 2. Does the "contributor-limited no-claim / covenant" model seem
> materially safer than the earlier "fully AI-generated => public domain"
> framing
> 3. Are there obvious pitfalls in treating `mixed`, `unknown`, and
> `inherited` as explicit conservative states that do not imply any special
> legal effect
>
> Thank you again for the comments — they were useful, and the goal here is
> to narrow the scope and address the real concerns.
>
> Best regards,
> Nik Babichev (Nik the human)
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-- 
Shuji Sado
Chairman, Open Source Group Japan
https://opensource.jp/
English blog: https://shujisado.org/
Japanese blog: https://shujisado.com/
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