[License-review] For Approval: OpenMDW License Agreement, versions 1.1 (OpenMDW-1.1)

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Thu Aug 13 18:26:29 UTC 2026


On 8/13/26 12:58, Richard Fontana via License-review wrote:
> So this is the provision in question:
> 
>> If you file, maintain, or voluntarily participate in a lawsuit against any
>> person or entity asserting that the Model Materials directly or indirectly
>> infringe any patent or copyright, then all rights and grants made to you
>> hereunder are terminated, unless that lawsuit was in response to a
>> corresponding lawsuit first brought against you.
> 
> This seems to potentially go further than the more familiar kinds of
> defensive termination provisions we see in modern open source
> licenses.

What if somebody actually _does_ have a case? That a third party sucked 
in their code, in violation of their copyrights, into your product? 
Without the maintainers necessarily being aware of the code's history?

What is... Ah, https://huggingface.co/blog/linuxfoundation/openmdw

It's AI slop. I actively don't care about that project screwing _itself_ 
over, but OSI approving a license with "there's NO SUCH THING as a 
legitimate copyright claim against one of these projects, no matter what 
they did" and normalizing it within the bounds of the open source 
definition seems creepy.

(And a sexbot seems even MORE likely to pull in external code and 
hallucinate ownership over it than a human would. I have no idea why 
this one is named after the facehuggers from Aliens, but "consent" 
doesn't seem high on their agenda...)

Rob


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