OpenRAIL
A family of AI model licences that are free of charge and freely redistributable, but ban certain uses — and require those bans to travel downstream.
The Responsible AI Licenses initiative drew up the framework, and it took off in 2022 with the BigScience licence for the BLOOM language model and CreativeML OpenRAIL-M for Stable Diffusion. StarCoder followed in 2023 with the BigCode variant. The suffix says what is being licensed: M for model, A for application, S for source, D for data.
The design borrows the mechanics of copyleft but not its purpose. What must be passed on isn't a set of freedoms but a list of prohibitions, such as generating disinformation or giving medical advice. That is exactly why OpenRAIL doesn't count as open source: the Open Source Definition forbids field-of-use restrictions. How a licensor is meant to detect or pursue misuse of weights downloaded a million times from Hugging Face is rarely explained.