Seeking Legal Review - CGPSAL v1.0 and its goals · CYB3RCA4T/CGPSAL-v1.0 · Discussion #1 · GitHub
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Seeking Legal Review - CGPSAL v1.0 and its goals
#1
CYB3RCA4T
announced in<br>Announcements
Seeking Legal Review - CGPSAL v1.0 and its goals
#1
CYB3RCA4T
May 20, 2026<br>·<br>0 comments
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CYB3RCA4T
May 20, 2026
Maintainer
Seeking Legal Review — CGPSAL v1.0 Source-Available License
What This Is
I wrote a source-available license for individual developers, indie creators, and small teams.
The goal is simple: grant broad free usage rights while preventing commercial exploitation by larger entities.
The license allows:
Unlimited personal, educational, and internal company use
Free hosted services, APIs, and SaaS (as long as users aren't charged for access)
Paid support and consulting
Public distribution with attribution (non-commercial only)
The license restricts:
Selling the software or monetizing its distribution
Running paid hosted services where the software is a core component
False endorsement or claiming official affiliation
Relicensing or removing copyright notices
Patent claims against users or the original author
A built-in Joint Consent Model also makes it usable by minor developers (ages 13–18) by requiring guardian co-signature for commercial licensing actions, while allowing independent publication.
Why I'm Posting This
I'm not a lawyer. I wrote this license to solve a real problem I saw: individual creators putting their work online, only to have companies integrate it into paid products with zero compensation or attribution.
Existing licenses either go too far or too little:
Copyleft (GPL) — requires source disclosure
Permissive (MIT/BSD) — allows unrestricted commercial use
CGPSAL sits in the middle — source-available, non-commercial distribution, broad internal use.
I'm seeking feedback from legal professionals on enforceability, clarity, and potential loopholes.
Long-Term Goals
My goal is simple: I want CGPSAL to be a license that any developer can drop into their repo and know they're protected.
When someone puts CGPSAL on their project, they should be able to:
Publish their code and set clear boundaries on commercial use
Know that a company can't just take it, put it in a paid product, and walk away
Not have to pay a lawyer to make it happen
It also supports minor developers — a 14-year-old should be able to publish their code under CGPSAL without needing parental permission, while commercial actions still require guardian involvement as a safeguard.
And when someone sees "CGPSAL-licensed" on a project, it should immediately mean something: this code is free to use, free to learn from, free to build on — but not free to monetize without permission.
Specific Questions
1. The "Core Component" Three-Part Test (Section 2)
I use three independent tests to determine if software is a "core component" of a paid hosted service:
(a) substantial re-engineering required to remove it
(b) essential to the primary value or advertised capability
(c) processes, generates, or materially transforms the primary output
Is this sufficiently precise for contract law, or would a court find terms like "primary value" and "materially transforms" too subjective?
2. Contribution Acceptance (Contributions Section)
Contributions are automatically accepted under the license terms upon merge, without requiring a separate CLA or checkbox.
Does this hold up under...