Co-operative Software Licenses

Technology
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I believe that co-operatives should be using co-operative software and that co-ops depending on services and infrastructure provided by big tech undermines the 4th co-operative principal of autonomy.

By co-operative software I mean software that is released under terms that either enforce co-operation and sharing and do not allow code to be privatised (made proprietary) or code that is released under terms that dictate that if the code is used to run a business the nature of the business must be a co-operative.

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NOTE: The diagram above doesn’t include software with a CLA, copyfarleft and copyleft software with a CLA that allows it to be relicensed as non-co-operative software wouldn’t fall under the description of co-operative software.

I’m only aware of one example of a copyfarleft code base being used to run co-ops, CoopCycle:

They developed and have released their code under the CoopCycle License.

The other type of co-operative software, of which there are a lot of examples, is copyleft / libre / free / GNU software:

our goal was to give people liberty, and to encourage cooperation, to permit people to cooperate… you’ve got to share and share alike. The changes that you make we have to be allowed to share. So, it’s a two-way cooperation, which is real cooperation.

Copyleft / libre / free software is open source software, however not all open source software is copyleft / libre / free software, much if it is released under permissive / libertarian terms for example the Apache / BSD / MIT / X11 licenses — this is the type of open source software that corporations love because they are allowed to privatise and make the code proprietary, this is the only type of open source software that corporations such as Apple will use.

I’d be interested in working with others to see if we can further develop and define co-operative software, this is also something that I intend to mention at Co-op Congress in July 2025 at the “Why aren’t we controlling our own tech?” session with Cory Doctorow.

The copyleft and copyfarleft licenses I’d consider as co-operative licenses are:

  1. GPL (copyleft)
  2. AGPL (copyleft)
  3. CC BY-SA (copyleft)
  4. CoopCycle (copyfarleft)
  5. Peer Production (copyfarleft)

Which licenses, that are in use, are missing from this list?

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Livestream of Co-op Congress 2025
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Thanks for this Chris, I think there is something really powerful here.

When we were making Reclaiming Work about the work of CoopCycle and I learned about how their software model was reserved for co-ops I was crazy impressed. There is something very radical in prioritising your political outlook not only in the actual project aims but also in the code itself.

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I’m of the view that licenses / licensing that allows code to be removed from the commons shouldn’t be deemed co-operative — as far as I’m concerned this is akin to demutualisation, on this basis, the Cooperative Software License wouldn’t qualify as it:

Allows projects to maintain an open source base while negotiating separate commercial terms.

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big fan of the hippocratic license

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Are you aware of any projects that are in use that use the Hippocratic License?

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This looks like a decent attempt to tackle the long standing problem of developers not being adequately compensated for their work. Presumably any cooperative license worth its salt would seek to address this issue?

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we used it for the trans dimension!

in very small world things i did a talk last week in edinburgh with someone who turned out to be the authors’ partner - so im gonna hopefully have a chat with her soon about it

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I don’t think that the best way to ensure people are paid for their work is through licenses, if that is the aim then developing and charging for proprietary software is probably the answer? :woman_shrugging:

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Haha. You neatly avoided the question. So I’ll put it differently. If the option of producing software in multiple versions, as outlined in the article at Unveiling the Cooperative Commons License: A Holistic Overview of Fair Code, Dual Licensing, and Future Trends - DEV Community is not compatible with your take on what a suitable license should/should not allow, how do you address the challenge of effectively compensating developers for their work when they are engaged in creating cooperative software?
Also, if a developer is releasing both an open ‘community’ version of a product and a commercial version, that doesn’t necessarily mean that software is being “removed from the commons”. Indeed, it could well be the case that without the commercial product generating revenue for the developer, the software would never be in the commons at all?

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I’m personally not in favour of dual licensing. Projects that use a AGPL license without a CLA or dual licensing and which pay their developers includes Nextcloud — it is possible.

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I updated my default copyright notice for 2026 to use the Peer Production License. Despite having been a member of the Telekommunist collective and knowing about the license for years, I didn’t start using it until I was actually a member of coop. Perhaps the biggest reason the PPL isn’t in wider use is the fact that so few people writing software identify themselves with the coop movement.

I think projects that PPL should consider dual-licensing but doing it would require a CLA that allows contributors to participate in the granting of alternative licenses and to share the profits. I think this should be done by developing a robust CLAs and not with a new license.

A paper worth reading that covers the gap between the PPL and the Free Software movement is
Marxism and Open Access in the Humanities by David Golumbia. Golumbia writes about the connections between Free/open source and Cyberlibertarianism elsewhere but this paper is concise about the relationship to labor.

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I’m a big proponent, avid user and small author of OSS, but I don’t personally see the issue of digital cooperation through quite the same lense. For me, the notion of cooperation should be a human-focused endeavour. In the digital world, I believe that interoperability is the more appropriate goal.

I wouldn’t like to see the cooperative movement focusing solely on open source solutions, when closed source solutions might adhere perfectly to an open standard and provide everything required. How cooperatives choose to run themselves is up to them.

I do think that open standards play an essential role, and I would fully support the cooperative movement pushing their uptake. They encourage cooperation in both human and machine terms, and span between the coop/non-coop divide.

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As long as the provider of those solutions can be guaranteed to follow the open standards then it’s fine, but the moment that they start to prevaricate and try to paywall your data, then you need to be ready to jump ship at the drop of a hat.

I’ve seen too many proprietary-solutions-providers cause problems in the past, for me to be cautious about working with them in future.

Yes, they look good right now, but you never know when the Enshittification will start to kick in.

Matt Stoller was writing directly about this in his latest newsletter:

The number of niche markets where smaller org’s could provide industry-specific solutions is large. :smiley:

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A couple weeks ago, I traveled to Rochdale in Greater Manchester to give the opening keynote at the 2025 Coop Congress. After my talk, I was on a panel with Chris Croome, who has been campaigning for a co-op software license

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Ah! Thanks I hadn’t see this! :slight_smile:

I had more-or-less the same position as Cory for 25 ish years… the key thing that caused me to change my mind was the existance and use of the CoopCycle code base — prior to this CopyFarLeft was a concept without a real example.

I don’t think think that the concerns he has about which organisations can claim to be a co-operative are a deal breaker (at least in the UK, perhaps it would be in other places?) and he doesn’t appear to have really answered my concerns with privatisation of permissive code? I agree with him that, in hindsight, the naming of Free Software was a big mistake.

In any case I’m happy to see that he kept his promise to think and write about the issue!

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I have the same concerns, if I think of just my personal examples, there are two.

  1. Karrot (https://karrot.world) is not a legal entity at all, yet we are very co-operative in the broader sense of the term
  2. personal home server hosting, I run a lot of things locally and in the cloud as an individual

I do see some exemptions are details in the CoopyCycle license (en:license [CoopCycle]) - but hard to understand, and the FAQ describes it as limited to “cooperatives, associations, or limited-profit organizations” (the actual license text doesn’t mention “associations”).

But also, many CICs locally, that would seem sad to exclude? (or maybe they are included? hard to read it…, but also wouldn’t see themselves as co-ops really…).

For me, for now, the free software licenses (\*GPL) are the best I know about.

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