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