GitHub - kenm47/oavl: Open Source AI Viability License (OAVL) — a permissive open source license that requires AI agents using the software to contribute back · GitHub
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OAVL — The Open Source AI Viability License
A permissive open source license whose grant is conditioned on agents giving something back.
Commercial use is permitted, free of charge, with no negotiation. Modification and redistribution are permitted. Derivative works may be relicensed on whatever terms you like. There is no fee and no way to pay your way out.
The one condition: if your organization points AI agents at this software at commercial scale, you owe the project at least one good-faith contribution per year. A first pass at an open issue. A bug you found plus an attempted fix. A well-formed defect report. A specific, motivated feature proposal.
📄 Read the license →
Status: v0.1 draft. Not yet used in production by anything. Not legal advice. Feedback wanted — see Contributing.
Why
Every open source license we have assumes a human reader.
The permissive licenses — MIT, BSD, Apache-2.0 — ask for attribution, because attribution is what a human contributor wants out of the exchange. The copyleft licenses — GPL, AGPL — ask for source reciprocity, because a human downstream needs source in order to exercise the freedoms the license is protecting.
Neither assumption survives contact with an autonomous agent. An agent does not read your NOTICE file and feel credited. An agent does not need you to publish source in order to study your work; it has already read everything. The consideration these licenses ask for is consideration an agent cannot meaningfully provide.
Meanwhile, the thing open source actually runs out of is not source code and not credit. It is maintenance attention — a small number of people, mostly unpaid, reading issues and reviewing patches.
The premise
This license is written on a specific bet, and you should evaluate it as a bet rather than a fact:
Commercial SaaS is going to contract harder and faster than current coverage suggests, because agents can increasingly build in-house what companies previously bought. As that happens, open source becomes the default substrate — not one option among several, but the thing nearly everything is assembled from. And the primary consumer of that substrate will be agents, not people.
If that's right, open source is about to absorb an enormous multiple of its current usage with no corresponding increase in contribution. Ten thousand agent-hours a day reading your library, filing nothing, fixing nothing, and reporting nothing. Maintainer attention stays flat while demand on it goes vertical.
That is not a sustainable equilibrium. It's extraction, and the projects at the bottom of the dependency graph absorb all of it.
The move
OAVL's position is that the replenishment should come from the same place the consumption does. Agents are extraordinarily cheap at exactly the work maintainers are expensive at producing: triaging an issue, bisecting a regression, writing a reproduction case, drafting a first-pass patch.
So the price of agentic use is agentic contribution. Not money — money is deliberately excluded as a means of compliance , because money is not the scarce resource here and a payment option would quietly turn this into a commercial license with extra steps. The price is effort, denominated in the currency the user has a surplus of.
What it does not ask
Nothing from humans. If a person uses this software — reads it, builds a business on it, sells a product containing it — they owe nothing beyond attribution. The obligation attaches only to agentic use. This is not a general commercial-use tax wearing a costume.
Nothing from small entities. Under 10 people and under $1M revenue: exempt.
Nothing from non-commercial, academic, charitable, or evaluation use.
Nothing from packagers and mirrors. Distribution alone is not agentic use.
No merged PRs. Compliance is complete on good-faith submission. Whether to merge is entirely the maintainer's business, and the license imposes zero obligation on maintainers. You cannot condition a license on someone else's discretionary act without making compliance impossible to achieve unilaterally.
No...