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

[Richard Fontana]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2026 at 9:16 AM Carlo Piana via License-review
<license-review at lists.opensource.org> wrote:

> As a general statement (II), I would submit at least two requirements:
[ . . . ]
> b) while a litigation retaliation clause has in the past been considered by and large both compliant and ethical, IMVHO the retaliation must be proportionate; therefore it should not transform into a more or less general waiver of one's right to the licensor as a price to become a licensee. This is distilled from a ius gentium principle, if and how it applies to OSD can be discussed separately.

*looks up _ius gentium_*  Yes, of course :)

Seriously, though, this encapsulates what happened historically in the
open source community. Early experiments with 'retaliation' clauses
often exhibited this disproportionality, which came to be viewed as
problematic, if not necessarily OSD-nonconformant.

> In the thread we have been submitted a lot of paradoxical situations discussing b) some of which probably too far fetched, but not all. I wonder therefore if there would be any way to restrict the effect of the termination to the subject matter of the litigation? Eg.: software is claimed to infringe, the license on the software and on the model that same software supports is terminated, but not the license of the documentation, of the training material and information, of other unrelated software artifacts and models etc.?

I thought to suggest something like this too. It would not solve all
questions, including:
* Can an open source license legitimately terminate the license for
copyright ligitation?
* Can an open source license legitimately terminate the license for
copyright litigation where the licensed material, and the thing
accused of copyright infringement, is model weights?
but it would at least reduce if not eliminate the problem which is the
consequence of the "Model Materials" construct, which I have suggested
may be an OSD 9 issue, and a modified OpenMDW-1.0 with that sort of
change might be unobjectionable.

> Thank you for a thought provoking submission causing a very lively discussion upon licensing -- something we haven't seen in years, I reckon.

+1