Give Back Software Licence · draft 0.1
You can give nothing. You just have to say so.
An open-source licence with exactly one binding obligation: publish an annual statement saying what your software is built on, what you gave back, and why you think that is fair.
Giving nothing is full compliance, provided you say so plainly. Not publishing is a breach. That asymmetry is the entire design.
Give Back Declaration
Northwind Logistics Ltd · year ending 31 Mar 2026
Why we think this is fair: we don’t, particularly. We have never looked at this before and had no budget line for it. We are proposing one for next year.
Published at northwind.example/.well-known/give-back.json
· This declaration is fully compliant.
A worked example. Every field is required; none of the numbers has a minimum. The licence cannot make Northwind pay anyone. It can make them look, and it can make what they saw a matter of public record.
The statement has three parts
I looked
The provenance of what you are running. What are you standing on, and who maintains each part of it? Not a licence audit — a look at the people.
What I did
What you gave back over the year, to whom, in a form of your choosing. Money, code, hosting, triage, documentation, a job. Or nothing.
Why I think that’s fair
A justification you write yourself. Nobody scores it. It sits on your own domain, under your own name, for anyone to read.
The asymmetry is the whole thing
Two failure modes, treated completely differently. This is what lets the licence be both approvable by a corporate lawyer and useful in the world — which no permissive or copyleft licence manages at once.
| Failure | Enforceable? | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| You did not publish | Yes | Objective, provable, dated. Terminates your rights. A court can rule on it without weighing anyone’s conduct. |
| You published something thin and self-serving | No | Nothing. It is simply public, on your own domain, indefinitely, under your name. |
The drafting rule that follows from this runs through every page here: define the required fields tightly, and the content not at all. A missing field is a breach. Weak content is an embarrassment. Every ambiguity gets pushed into the content, where it does no legal damage.
Make giving mandatory and you have written a fee. Then you need an amount, and a currency, and someone to collect it, and an institution that must still exist and still be honest in eighty years. That is the failure that killed the previous attempt at this. So: no amount, no percentage, no schedule, and no number anywhere in the binding text.
Where the statement lives
On a path you control, on a domain you already own. Nothing to sign up for, nobody to notify, no account to keep alive.
https://your-company.example/.well-known/give-back.json
Same shape as security.txt, ACME, and OpenID discovery. Publishing to a
registry is not required and never will be — a registry that dies would make
compliance impossible, and that is the exact trap this design is built to avoid. Instead,
registries compete to crawl you. The statement is the index.
The obligation attaches to the organisation, once a year — not to each deployment. One file covers every piece of software you use under this licence, so the second project you adopt costs nothing extra to comply with. The licence gets cheaper as it spreads.
This site publishes its own:
oosl.org/.well-known/give-back.json.
Both sides publish
Licensors publish a maintainer profile about themselves — size in bands, funding status, whether anyone is paid, where money would go. Not out of fairness, though it is fairer. Out of necessity:
“Give where it is needed” is currently uncomputable. Is React’s maintainer Meta, or three unpaid people? Nobody can answer that without hours of manual research.
Profiles make it computable. Walk the tree, resolve each node to a maintainer, read their profile. The give-back report stops being a gesture and becomes a picture.
If the licensor stops publishing their profile, the licensee’s duty lapses. No institution is required to enforce anything; the incentive is internal. And since almost everyone building on this ends up on both sides of it, dropping your own profile to escape your duty would also void the duty owed to you.
What is on this site
Why this exists →
The argument. Provenance, xz utils, why AGPL protects the wrong half, and why licences that say “should” fail in both directions.
The licence →
Full draft text with the reasoning behind each clause shown alongside it. Short, and deliberately dull.
The standard →
The norms. Non-binding, revisable without relicensing anything. This is where the culture lives, and where numbers are allowed.
Declaration format →
The JSON schema, a worked example, and a page you could hand to a developer with no further explanation.
Maintainer profile →
What a project publishes about itself, and how the conditional obligation reads it.
The tool →
Paste a dependency file, walk the tree, see who is actually behind it, and get a draft declaration back. Touches no money.
The registry →
Crawled declarations, searchable. One of several, by design — anyone can crawl the same files and build a better one.
FAQ →
Honest answers on OSI status, on “can I really give nothing” (yes), and on what the declaration must not contain.
Open questions →
What is still undecided, including the base licence and the name. Published unresolved on purpose.
What this is not
- Not OSI-approved. It has not been submitted and probably would not pass. Call it source-available with a disclosure obligation until and unless that changes. The full argument.
- Not a payment platform. It moves no money and holds no funds. It points at funding channels that already exist.
- Not a certification. Nobody verifies anything, nobody issues a badge, no body has to exist forever. You publish; readers judge.
- Not tied to any product. Its first user builds a knowledge tool called Kanecta, and you will not find that name in the licence text, the schema, or the path. Deliberately.
- Not finished. No lawyer has read a word of this. It is published early so it can be argued with while it is still cheap to change.