OMLA has been shut down.
The Open Model Licensing Association is no longer active and will not be developed further. The OMLA license (v2.0, “OMLA Direct”) and the registry were never published and were not used. This website is kept online as a historical record only.
A royalty and direct-settlement license for open AI models
OMLA was designing a licensing framework that would let the people who publish open-weight AI models share in the money those models earn — the way a radio station pays a royalty when it plays a song. The plan was called “OMLA Direct”: a public registry of signed model manifests, paired with a self-assessed quarterly settlement in which a company using a model commercially would compute what it owed and pay creators directly, wallet to wallet.
By design, OMLA itself would have held no custody of funds and kept no knowledge of who paid whom — no reports, no accounts, no payment infrastructure, no middleman. The license text was drafted but never published in production, and the registry was never used.
Other organizations were already doing this work
OMLA was retired on 2026-08-26 because other organizations are already pursuing equivalent open-model licensing approaches. Rather than duplicate that effort, the project was wound down as not needed. Its pages remain here, unchanged, as a record of the work.
Existing open-model and open-source licenses
- RAIL / OpenRAIL licenses — the Responsible AI Licenses family adds use-based restrictions to otherwise open model licenses, letting creators permit broad use while reserving the right to prohibit specific harmful applications.
- Creative Commons licenses — a widely used family of free copyright licenses (including CC BY and CC BY-SA) that creators often apply to datasets, media, and some model weights.
- Open Source AI Definition (OSI) — the Open Source Initiative’s community standard for what counts as “open source” AI, covering both code and the model’s parameters and data.
- Apache License 2.0 — a permissive open-source license that grants broad rights including an express patent grant, and is a common default for open model weights and code.
- MIT License — a short, permissive open-source license that allows reuse in almost any project with minimal conditions.
The rest of the site is unchanged
The license, FAQ, how-it-works, registry, and other pages remain in place as a historical record of what was planned. They describe a system that was never launched. The About page — including the founding member’s biography — is kept intact.