In October 2014, a developer wrote to a PostgreSQL mailing list with a problem. His employer’s open source office required a signed contributor license agreement before he could contribute, and he could not find PostgreSQL’s. Tom Lane answered:
There are no such agreements for Postgres work. The community explicitly rejected the idea more than a dozen years
Most projects choose a license the way most people choose a default shell: it was already on fire there when they arrived. The LICENSE file came with the project template, or the ecosystem, or the last project, and nobody has opened it since.
That works more often than it should. But the licenses differ from each other on purpose.
Two things happened in the last 48 hours that will each get cited for years. On Tuesday the Third Circuit became the first federal appeals court to decide whether training an AI system on copyrighted material is fair use, and said no, at least for a non-generative system built to compete with the source. The opinion, unsealed Wednesday, goes out
Last Wednesday the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the DMCA claims in Doe v. GitHub, Inc., No. 24-7700 (9th Cir. Sept. 16, 2026). The headlines said GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI won. They did. Your vendor rep has probably already emailed you about it.
Here is the thing to understand before you forward that email to your VP
Google maintains a public web page whose entire purpose is to tell Google engineers not to use one specific open source license. Not a general licensing policy (they have one of those too); a dedicated page, for one license, that opens with “MUST NOT” in capital letters and goes on to prohibit installing the stuff on a Google-issued laptop. The
California SB 1000 is sitting on Assembly third reading right now, and the Legislature has until midnight on 31 August to pass it. It amends the California AI Transparency Act, which has only been operative since 2 August. If you ship model weights, or host anyone else’s, you should read it before it becomes law rather than after.
“You never actually own a project, you merely look after it for the next generation.”
— with apologies to Patek Phillippe.
In early March 2026, Dan Blanchard published chardet 7.0.0. The package metadata was familiar — same name on PyPI, same import path, same public API. The license was not. Versions 1.1 through 6.x had shipped
The php.internals vote closed on April 4, and PHP 9.0 will ship under the 3-clause BSD license. The RFC, driven by Ben Ramsey, replaces both the PHP License v3.01 and the Zend Engine License v2.0 with a single, OSI-recognized, FSF-recognized, GPL-compatible permissive license that has been sitting on the shelf for thirty-five years. This is a good decision, and the
The Supreme Court denied cert in Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, leaving in place the DC Circuit’s holding that the Copyright Office may refuse to register a work whose sole listed author is a machine. That’s it. That’s the holding.
The case is narrower than the headlines suggest. Stephen Thaler’s “Creativity Machine” produced a static image titled “A
Every few months somebody publishes a “state of open source licensing” piece, and most of them aren’t worth your time. This one is.
Gabriel Anhaia’s Open Source in 2026: The Fork Wars Are Getting Ugly pulls the year’s licensing disasters — OnlyOffice trying to weaponize AGPLv3 §7 against Nextcloud, IBM-flavored HashiCorp grinding away at OpenTofu contributors, Cal.com’s “AI made