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Open Software License 1.0


Also known as OSL 1.0, OSL-1.0, Open Software License 1.0.

Commercial use
allowed
Share alike
required
Attribution
required (keep the copyright and license notices)

Write this as a license text (needs an account) DALICC reads the model above and writes what it permits, requires and prohibits in plain English. Without an account, the Text download above writes the model out from the vocabulary.

Canonical URI https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/OSL-1.0

Permissions

  • Charge distribution fee from the text Charging a fee for the act of providing a copy of the work to someone else.
  • Charge license fee from the text Charging a fee for granting someone a license to the work.
  • Commercial use from the text Using the work to generate income, directly or indirectly, for example by selling it or by using it in advertising.
  • Derivative works from the text Distributing an adaptation of the work and making it available to the public.
  • Derive from the text Creating a new work from the work, such as a translation, adaptation or arrangement of it or of a part of it.

    Duties

    • Notice from the text The text says: "Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license to do the following: a) to reproduce the Original Work in copies; b) to prepare derivative works (“Derivative Works”) based upon the Original Work; c) to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License; d) to perform the Original Work publicly; and e) to display the Original Work publicly." Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
  • Display from the text Showing the work to the public without making a copy the viewer keeps.
  • Distribute from the text Providing copies of the work to the public or to anyone else.

    Duties

    • Notice from the text The text says: "Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license to do the following: a) to reproduce the Original Work in copies; b) to prepare derivative works (“Derivative Works”) based upon the Original Work; c) to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License; d) to perform the Original Work publicly; and e) to display the Original Work publicly." Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
    • Source code from the text Providing access to the source code of the work with every copy distributed.
  • Modified works from the text Distributing a modified version of the work that does not amount to a new, derivative work.
  • Modify from the text Altering the work, for example by updating it, without creating a new work; an alteration that creates a new work is Derive.

    Duties

    • Notice from the text The text says: "Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license to do the following: a) to reproduce the Original Work in copies; b) to prepare derivative works (“Derivative Works”) based upon the Original Work; c) to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License; d) to perform the Original Work publicly; and e) to display the Original Work publicly." Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
  • Network use trigger from the text Making the work available over a network, deploying it or providing a service with it.

    Duties

    • Source code from the text Providing access to the source code of the work with every copy distributed.
  • Patent grant from the text The text says: "Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license, under patent claims owned or controlled by the Licensor that are embodied in the Original Work as furnished by the Licensor (“Licensed Claims”) to make, use, sell and offer for sale the Original Work." Granting a license under the patent claims that a contributor holds and that the contribution necessarily infringes.
  • Present from the text Performing the work in public, including by broadcast or other communication to the public.
  • Reproduce from the text Making copies of the work in any form.

Prohibitions

  • Change license from the text Not permitted: Change license. Replacing the license of the work, or of an adaptation, with another license, or changing its terms.
  • Promote from the text Not permitted: Promote. Using the name or trademarks of the licensor or of contributors to endorse or promote a product.
  • Sublicense from the text Not permitted: Sublicense. Granting a third party rights in the work under a license of the licensee's own, rather than passing on the original license.

License-wide duties

  • Share alike from the text Adaptations have to be licensed under the same license or one the license names as compatible.

What applies by default

The statements above are the library's reading of this license: each is marked with the sentence it rests on, or as a library convention where the text is not explicit. The statements below are the ones the DALICC reasoner supplies for acts the license says nothing about, from the default rules of the dependency graph it reasons with. Each one names the legal source it rests on. None of it is in the record.

No default rule of that graph reaches this license: it speaks about every act the rules are about.

Further terms

These are the things the license says about itself beyond the acts it permits, forbids and requires: when it ends, how long there is to put a breach right, which law governs it, and so on. A term that comes from the DALICC vocabulary links to its definition.

Patent license ends if you sue
Yes. Not a ban on suing: a patent claim over the work ends the patent license, or the whole license, as the text provides.
Terminates on breach
Yes

Clauses

Warranty disclaimer

LICENSOR WARRANTS THAT THE COPYRIGHT IN AND TO THE ORIGINAL WORK IS OWNED BY THE LICENSOR OR THAT THE ORIGINAL WORK IS DISTRIBUTED BY LICENSOR UNDER A VALID CURRENT LICENSE FROM THE COPYRIGHT OWNER. EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY STATED IN THE IMMEDIATELY PRECEEDING SENTENCE, THE ORIGINAL WORK IS PROVIDED UNDER THIS LICENSE ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE WARRANTY OF NON-INFRINGEMENT AND WARRANTIES THAT THE ORIGINAL WORK IS MERCHANTABLE OR FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY OF THE ORIGINAL WORK IS WITH YOU. THIS DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY CONSTITUTES AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THIS LICENSE. NO LICENSE TO ORIGINAL WORK IS GRANTED HEREUNDER EXCEPT UNDER THIS DISCLAIMER.

Limitation of liability

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES AND UNDER NO LEGAL THEORY, WHETHER TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), CONTRACT, OR OTHERWISE, SHALL THE LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO ANY PERSON FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY CHARACTER ARISING AS A RESULT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OF THE ORIGINAL WORK INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF GOODWILL, WORK STOPPAGE, COMPUTER FAILURE OR MALFUNCTION, OR ANY AND ALL OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES OR LOSSES, EVEN IF SUCH PERSON SHALL HAVE BEEN INFORMED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY SHALL NOT APPLY TO LIABILITY FOR DEATH OR PERSONAL INJURY RESULTING FROM SUCH PARTY'S NEGLIGENCE TO THE EXTENT APPLICABLE LAW PROHIBITS SUCH LIMITATION. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO THIS EXCLUSION AND LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

Additional clauses

3) Grant of Source Code License. The term "Source Code" means the preferred form of the Original Work for making modifications to it and all available documentation describing how to access and modify the Original Work. Licensor hereby agrees to provide a machine-readable copy of the Source Code of the Original Work along with each copy of the Original Work that Licensor distributes. Licensor reserves the right to satisfy this obligation by placing a machine-readable copy of the Source Code in an information repository reasonably calculated to permit inexpensive and convenient access by You for as long as Licensor continues to distribute the Original Work, and by publishing the address of that information repository in a notice immediately following the copyright notice that applies to the Original Work. 4) Exclusions From License Grant. Nothing in this License shall be deemed to grant any rights to trademarks, copyrights, patents, trade secrets or any other intellectual property of Licensor except as expressly stated herein. No patent license is granted to make, use, sell or offer to sell embodiments of any patent claims other than the Licensed Claims defined in Section 2. No right is granted to the trademarks of Licensor even if such marks are included in the Original Work. Nothing in this License shall be interpreted to prohibit Licensor from licensing under different terms from this License any Original Work that Licensor otherwise would have a right to license. 5) External Deployment. The term "External Deployment" means the use or distribution of the Original Work or Derivative Works in any way such that the Original Work or Derivative Works may be accessed or used by anyone other than You, whether the Original Work or Derivative Works are distributed to those persons, made available as an application intended for use over a computer network, or used to provide services or otherwise deliver content to anyone other than You. As an express condition for the grants of license hereunder, You agree that any External Deployment by You shall be deemed a distribution and shall be licensed to all under the terms of this License, as prescribed in section 1(c) herein. 8) Acceptance and Termination. Nothing else but this License (or another written agreement between Licensor and You) grants You permission to create Derivative Works based upon the Original Work, and any attempt to do so except under the terms of this License (or another written agreement between Licensor and You) is expressly prohibited by U.S. copyright law, the equivalent laws of other countries, and by international treaty. Therefore, by exercising any of the rights granted to You in Sections 1 and 2 herein, You indicate Your acceptance of this License and all of its terms and conditions. This license shall terminate immediately and you may no longer exercise any of the rights granted to You by this License upon Your failure to honor the proviso in Section 1(c) herein. 9) Mutual Termination for Patent Action. This License shall terminate automatically and You may no longer exercise any of the rights granted to You by this License if You file a lawsuit in any court alleging that any OSI Certified open source software that is licensed under any license containing this "Mutual Termination for Patent Action" clause infringes any patent claims that are essential to use that software. 10) Jurisdiction, Venue and Governing Law. You agree that any lawsuit arising under or relating to this License shall be maintained in the courts of the jurisdiction wherein the Licensor resides or in which Licensor conducts its primary business, and under the laws of that jurisdiction excluding its conflict-of-law provisions. The application of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods is expressly excluded. Any use of the Original Work outside the scope of this License or after its termination shall be subject to the requirements and penalties of the U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq., the equivalent laws of other countries, and international treaty. This section shall survive the termination of this License. This license is Copyright (C) 2002 Lawrence E. Rosen. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to copy and distribute this license without modification. This license may not be modified without the express written permission of its copyright owner.

Info

Target asset types
Software
Region / jurisdiction
Worldwide
Validity
Perpetual
Source
https://spdx.org/licenses/OSL-1.0.html
Legal code
https://opensource.org/license/OSL-1.0
This description is published under
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Publisher
Lawrence Rosen
Attribution name
Lawrence E. Rosen
SPDX identifier
OSL-1.0 on the SPDX license list
DALICC identifier
OSL-1.0

This record is published under CC BY 4.0. Credit it as: DALICC License Library, DALICC - Verein zur Förderung der Rechtssicherheit in der Datenbewirtschaftung, https://dalicc.net, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The license it describes belongs to its publisher.

Use this license

Everything below is generated from this record. Replace the example address with the address of your own work.

JSON sidecar

{
  "license-uri": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/OSL-1.0",
  "license-title": "Open Software License 1.0",
  "spdx-id": "OSL-1.0",
  "asset": null,
  "generated-by": "DALICC"
}

RDF, Turtle

@prefix cc: <http://creativecommons.org/ns#> .

<https://example.org/my-work>
    cc:license <https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/OSL-1.0> .

RDF, JSON-LD

{
  "@context": {
    "cc": "http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
  },
  "@id": "https://example.org/my-work",
  "cc:license": {
    "@id": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/OSL-1.0"
  }
}

This license carries no attribution duty, so no credit line is offered here.

Badge DALICC badge for Open Software License 1.0

Markdown

[![License: Open Software License 1.0](https://dalicc.net/license-library/OSL-1.0/badge.svg)](https://dalicc.net/license-library/OSL-1.0)

HTML

<a href="https://dalicc.net/license-library/OSL-1.0"><img src="https://dalicc.net/license-library/OSL-1.0/badge.svg" alt="License: Open Software License 1.0"></a>

Review

Written from the license text by
Giray Havur
Written on
2026-09-15
Second review
not yet done
Record changed since this review
yes (version 2, 2026-09-24)
Findings
9 recorded, 6 applied to the record, 0 proposed

The first Open Software License: the reciprocal twin of the Academic Free License, whose clause 1(c) requires every copy the licensee distributes to be licensed under the Open Software License. The record follows OSL-3.0, with a licence-wide cc:ShareAlike duty, and differs from it where version 1.0 is different: it is not sublicenseable and it has no attribution clause. Nothing here is legal advice.

9 findings
  • info Rubric 2 odrl:target applied

    dcmitype:Software alone, the type 32 of the library's software records carry, among them MIT, BSD-3-Clause, GPL-3.0-only and the sibling OSL-3.0. These texts license an "original work of authorship", which would also fit dalicc:CreativeWork, the type the AFL-3.0 record carries beside Software and Dataset; the review group keeps the narrower reading its review plan prescribes, so that all nine records of the family answer alike and the association can widen them in one pass.

  • major Rubric 3 odrl:permission applied

    Section 1 grants a "non-sublicenseable license" to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute to the public, perform and display publicly; section 2 grants a patent licence "to make, use, sell and offer for sale the Original Work", so dalicc:patentGrant is a permission and dalicc:chargeLicenseFee follows the right to sell. odrl:grantUse is deliberately not written: the record carries a cc:ShareAlike duty and the consistency check treats grant-use together with share-alike as a conflict.

  • major Rubric 4 odrl:prohibition applied

    dalicc:sublicense, because the grant is expressly "non-sublicenseable"; dalicc:ChangeLicense, because clause 1(c) admits no other licence for the copies You distribute; dalicc:promote, from section 4, "No right is granted to the trademarks of Licensor even if such marks are included in the Original Work"; and dalicc:patentRetaliationTermination from section 9.

  • major Rubric 5 odrl:duty applied

    Clause 1(c) grants the right "to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License". That is a licence-wide cc:ShareAlike duty, the form OSL-3.0 and the GNU records use. cc:Notice hangs on the three acts, cc:SourceCode on odrl:distribute. Version 1.0 has no attribution clause, so cc:Attribution is not written, which is the one duty that separates this record from OSL-2.0.

  • minor Rubric 6 dalicc:additionalClauses applied

    Sections 6 and 7 are quoted into their own fields. dalicc:additionalClauses carries sections 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10 and the notice that the licence text may not be modified.

  • info Rubric 7 cc:jurisdiction applied

    Section 10 points at "the courts of the jurisdiction wherein the Licensor resides or in which Licensor conducts its primary business", which names no legal system, so cc:jurisdiction stays dalicc:worldwide and the clause is quoted.

  • gap Rubric 8 dalicc:additionalClauses none

    Section 5, External Deployment, makes any use over a computer network a distribution and therefore a trigger of the share-alike duty. The vocabulary has no term for it; proposed term dalicc:networkUseTrigger, the same gap the AGPL and OSL-3.0 reviews record. The automatic termination in section 8 has no property either; proposed term dalicc:terminatesOnBreach. Both clauses are quoted.

  • info Rubric 9 record none

    The consistency check of app.services.composer with the axioms of dg_default returned an empty list for this record.

  • info Rubric 10 family none

    OSL-1.0 is AFL-1.1 with the proviso in clause 1(c) and the External Deployment clause added, which is what makes it reciprocal. Against OSL-3.0 it lacks the attribution clause and the sublicensing grant.

Report an issue The review record as JSON The review checks the model against the license text. It is not legal advice.

History

This license model has 2 versions. Version 2 is the one served today; every earlier version keeps its own address, so a conclusion drawn from one of them can still be checked against it.

  1. Version 2 current2026-09-24 Giray Havur

    The changes since version 1 recorded which sentence of the text each statement rests on and named the license the record itself is published under.

    5 changes
    • changed permission dalicc:patentGrant

      was permission dalicc:patentGrant

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license, under patent claims owned or controlled by the Licensor that are embodied in the Original Work as furnished by the Licensor (“Licensed Claims”) to make, use, sell and offer for sale the Original Work."

    • changed permission odrl:derive with duties [cc:Notice]

      was permission odrl:derive with duties [cc:Notice]

      Manual edit Its duty cc:Notice quotes "Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license to do the following: a) to reproduce the Original Work in copies; b) to prepare derivative works (“Derivative Works”) based upon the Original Work; c) to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License; d) to perform the Original Work publicly; and e) to display the Original Work publicly."

    • changed permission odrl:distribute with duties [cc:Notice, cc:SourceCode]

      was permission odrl:distribute with duties [cc:Notice, cc:SourceCode]

      Manual edit Its duty cc:Notice quotes "Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license to do the following: a) to reproduce the Original Work in copies; b) to prepare derivative works (“Derivative Works”) based upon the Original Work; c) to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License; d) to perform the Original Work publicly; and e) to display the Original Work publicly."

    • changed permission odrl:modify with duties [cc:Notice]

      was permission odrl:modify with duties [cc:Notice]

      Manual edit Its duty cc:Notice quotes "Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license to do the following: a) to reproduce the Original Work in copies; b) to prepare derivative works (“Derivative Works”) based upon the Original Work; c) to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License; d) to perform the Original Work publicly; and e) to display the Original Work publicly."

    • added dct:license <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>

      Manual edit Every record is published under CC BY 4.0. cc:license names the record DALICC keeps of that licence; dct:license now names it by the address Creative Commons publishes it at, so that a consumer matching the canonical IRI finds it.

  2. Version 1

    Created from the license text on 2026-09-15 (Academic Free and Open Software).

Every change names the reason behind it: a finding of the content review, one of its library-wide decisions, the metadata that review wrote onto every record, or a hand edit. None of it is legal advice.

Nothing on this page is legal advice. What a license means is decided by its text; ask a legal advisor before you rely on it.