{"id":"NPOSL-3.0","title":"Non-Profit Open Software License 3.0","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://opensource.org/license/NPOSL-3.0","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"The Open Software License 3.0 with a Non-Profit Amendment: the same reciprocal grant, the same external deployment clause and the same patent retaliation, but only a not-for-profit organisation that derives no revenue from the work may distribute under it. The record is OSL-3.0 with commercial use and both fee permissions turned into prohibitions. Nothing here is legal advice.","findings":[{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"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.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"Section 1 grants a \"worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable license, for the duration of the copyright\" to reproduce, adapt, distribute or communicate, perform and display, so dalicc:sublicense is a permission, and section 2 grants a patent licence, so dalicc:patentGrant is one. odrl:grantUse is not written, for the reason the OSL-3.0 review gives: it would conflict with the share-alike duty under the current axioms.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"Amendment 17(a) says the Licensor \"is a not-for-profit organization that derives no revenue whatsoever from the distribution of the Original Work or Derivative Works thereof, or from support or services relating thereto\", and 17(d) lets You distribute under this licence \"only if You make the representation and declaration in paragraph (a)\". cc:CommercialUse, dalicc:chargeDistributionFee and dalicc:chargeLicenseFee are therefore prohibited, which is where this record parts company with OSL-3.0. dalicc:ChangeLicense, dalicc:promote and dalicc:patentRetaliationTermination are prohibited as in OSL-3.0.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"Clause 1(c) keeps the proviso that copies You distribute or communicate \"shall be licensed under this Non-Profit Open Software License or as provided in section 17(d)\", so cc:ShareAlike is a licence-wide duty. Section 6, Attribution Rights, puts cc:Attribution, cc:Notice and dalicc:modificationNotice on odrl:modify and odrl:derive; cc:SourceCode hangs on odrl:distribute.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"Amendment 17(b) strikes the warranty of provenance, so the quoted disclaimer begins at \"The Original Work is provided under this License on an \"AS IS\" BASIS\"; 17(c) adds direct damages to the limitation of liability, which the quoted section 8 carries. dalicc:additionalClauses holds sections 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 16 and the whole of the Non-Profit Amendment.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"Section 11 names no legal system, only the forum where the Licensor resides or does business, so cc:jurisdiction stays dalicc:worldwide.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"Three gaps, all quoted instead: the external deployment trigger of section 5 (proposed dalicc:networkUseTrigger), the assent requirement of section 9 (proposed dalicc:recipientAssent) and the automatic termination (proposed dalicc:terminatesOnBreach). A fourth would be useful here: the non-profit status of the distributor is a property of the licensee, not an action, and the record expresses it only through the three prohibitions; proposed dalicc:nonProfitLicenseeOnly.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check of app.services.composer with the axioms of dg_default returned an empty list for this record.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"family","description":"NPOSL-3.0 is OSL-3.0 plus section 17. The library decision on charging under a non-commercial licence (keep dalicc:chargeDistributionFee under NC) was not followed here, because 17(a) bars revenue from distribution in as many words, which is stricter than the Creative Commons non-commercial clause the decision was taken for.","action":"none"}],"family":"Academic Free and Open Software","port_of":null,"variant_kind":"version","notes":"Modelled from the SPDX plain text of NPOSL-3.0 and checked against the URL in cc:legalcode. The record is a version variant of OSL-3.0 in substance; port_of stays null because the vocabulary reserves that key for jurisdiction ports."}