Licensing

The FreeU Licensing Scheme is intended to allow developers to license projects under FOSS-like terms, yet still provide ample opportunity to be compensated through FreeU membership payments. The interlocking licensing scheme consists of four corridor licenses, plus a membership license which provides maximum flexibility to licensors in exchange for ongoing membership payments. The entirety of all payments are allocated to developers.

Corridor Licenses

The corridor licenses are:

Any developer or organization can use code under any one of these licenses provided that they follow the license terms. The corridor licenses are designed to fit developer's licensing preferences and provide significant flexibility in terms of positive versus negative liberty choices.

FreeU intends on submitting the four corridor licenses to OSI for approval as open source licenses.

The FreeU Liberal License is similar to permissive licenses such as the MIT License or the Apache 2.0 license; developers need not distribute source-code under this license. The FreeU CopyLeft License is a file-level copyleft license similar to the Mozilla Public License 2.0; developers only need to distribute source-code-changes to modified files when they create a derivative work. The FreeU CopyLeft License is like the GNU Affero General Public License in that any distribution of any derivative or collective work must include source code; this license also closes the ASP loophole. Finally, The FreeU Transparent Strong CopyLeft License adds transparency requirements on top of the Strong Copyleft license. Any document purporting to transfer or effect copyright from the original human developer must be publicly disclosed by the licensor. This includes work-for-hire agreements, employment agreements, invention assignment agreements, etc.

The four corridor licenses form a hierarchy in that projects may only be sublicensed under equal or less-permissive licenses. Code distributed under the Strong copyleft license may only be sublicensed under the more restricted Transparent Strong Copyleft License. Code licensed under the Copyleft License may be sublicensed either under the Strong Copyleft License or the Transparent Strong Copyleft License. Code licensed under the Liberal License may be distributed under any of the other three licenses since each is more restrictive than the Liberal License.

The FreeU Paid License provides an escape hatch from source code and transparency encumberances imposed by the corridor licenses. This license is only available to licensors that pay a quarterly fee based on the energy use of the hardware the software runs on. This fee arrangement ensures that FreeU incentives are in line with what is good for the planet.

Cooperative Development

FreeU uses these licenses to create a Cooperative Development Model where free software is sustainably developed and maintained.