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

[Pamela Chestek]

on 8/25/2026 2:54 PM, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> On 8/24/26 03:20, Pamela Chestek wrote:
>>
>> Taking AI entirely out of the picture, you confirmed that the 
>> copyright owner of an MIT-licensed package would be precluded from 
>> bringing a lawsuit against the OpenMDW-1.1 licensor for that 
>> licensor's failure to comply with the terms of the MIT license. So 
>> what you are proposing is that a completely non-culpable party has to 
>> give up a claim against what might be a deliberate, intentional, 
>> unlawful act, which is not the patent scenario.
>>
> I don't understand how you get to this conclusion. Are you arguing 
> that every single piece of content ingested to train a LLM must be 
> explicitly licensed? If so, how do you square it with the US fair use 
> principles and the text and data mining exception in the EU?
I don't know how you're reading that into my comment. I am taking no 
position on it at all. My comment was instead that, removing AI from the 
dialog altogether and considering it just as an ordinary FOSS license 
(how it can also be used), demonstrates the tension, one that in my 
opinion weighs against approving it.
>
> My impression reading the license and dealing with AI and the OSD is 
> that the license is actually trying to protect open developers: the 
> most transparent models either "suck" because they don't have enough 
> openly licensed data to train on or are immediately punished by 
> lawsuits because they disclose their training sets (and get sued, to 
> test copyright law boundaries or to extract some revenue).
>
> This dilemma is the center of the whole open source ai definition 
> debate and IMO won't be solved by a license but needs to be solved at 
> the policy level. IMO the evaluation of the OpenMDW license (or any 
> new license that addresses the space) shouldn't be encumbered by 
> policy discussions.

I couldn't disagree more. The role of the OSI is to preserve and protect 
the open source ecosystem and community, which should be a fundamental 
part of the review of any license - does it advance the interests of the 
open source community?

Pam

Pamela S. Chestek
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