Software Licensing
Copyleft exposure, licence-change risk, and AI code provenance: open-source obligations most commercial teams underestimate. The Beyond the source code series follows this work as it develops.
PhotoCraft: the legal questions an AI-assisted rewrite leaves open
An AI-assisted Photoshop alternative puts three different questions into focus: was the research lawful, was the implementation independent, and can the resulting software be used and distributed lawfully?
OpenMDW 1.1: A practical guide for companies adopting AI models
What the licence permits, what remains outside its scope, and what companies should check before adopting an OpenMDW model.
Memorised copyleft code in open-weight models and the obligations European Union law leaves undefined
The exposure open-weight adopters carry, and why ordinary open-source compliance was never designed to find it.
Chardet: clean rooms, copyleft and the AI rewrite problem
What an AI-assisted rewrite of a small Python library reveals about the cost structure that copyleft has always depended on
Beyond the source code: the hidden licensing crisis in open AI
Open-weight AI models carry licence obligations at every stage of their distribution chain. Cloud-based inference providers eliminate the visibility that makes those obligations enforceable.
Beyond the source code: your infrastructure vendor changed its licence, and your legal team probably does not know
MongoDB, Redis, Elastic, and HashiCorp all changed their licences without warning. Some have since reversed. The commercial risks for companies that built on these products have not.
Beyond the source code: one GPL violation, five compounding legal exposures
A single unnoticed GPL violation does not stop at copyright infringement. It opens five compounding legal exposures, each with its own enforcement route, its own plaintiff, and its own remedy.
When does software become “AI”? The EU definition that catches businesses off guard
Most companies think they are not using AI. The EU AI Act may disagree. The legal definition captures systems that businesses use every day and excludes others that are marketed as AI.
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