The association behind the license
OMLA — the Open Model Licensing Association — is a Washington non-profit with one job: make it normal for the people who create open-weight AI models to share in the money those models earn. It maintains the OMLA Model License, runs the public registry, computes what commercial users owe, and publishes it — then gets out of the way while the parties settle directly.
Built by tinkerers who kept finding their work inside other people's products
OMLA started in a garage in Seattle. Jake Lloyd — a builder who trains and tunes models on his own hardware — kept watching a pattern repeat across the open-model ecosystem: someone pours months into a model, releases it openly, and then finds it quietly powering commercial products that return nothing to anyone who made it. The usual answers were bad ones: lock everything behind proprietary licenses, or accept that open means unpaid.
The OMLA License is the third answer. It keeps models genuinely open — free for research, learning, and hobby work, with no copyleft and no telemetry — and attaches exactly one obligation: commercial use shares 30% with the creators. The association exists to make that one rule practical: a registry that proves whose work a model is, arithmetic anyone can check, and a published record of what is owed to whom.
Four commitments that shape everything
No custody, ever
OMLA never holds, moves, or touches money. It computes and publishes; licensees and creators settle directly.
Creators first
The 30% creator pool goes entirely to the people who made the model. OMLA takes no cut of any royalty.
Open and practical
No copyleft, no lock-in, no telemetry. One rule that a solo tuner and an enterprise can both live with.
Honest in public
A public roadmap, an append-only audit log, and beta labels where they're true. What isn't built yet says so.
A young non-profit, run in the open
OMLA is incorporated as a Washington non-profit; federal 501(c) recognition is pending, so donations are not yet tax-deductible. It charges nothing on royalties by design, and keeps the lights on through donations and sponsorships. Operating costs and where the money goes are published on the support page.
Governance sits with a founding board — currently one founding member and two open seats being actively recruited, alongside calls for compliance officers and technical contributors. Decisions that affect models on the registry are deliberate, human, and recorded in the audit log.
Meet, join, ask, or help fund it
Board & governance
Who steers OMLA, the founding member's background, and the two open board seats.
Partners & sponsors
Payment enablers, compliance officers, regional and technical partners — and sponsorships.
Press & outreach
The elevator pitch, a copy-ready one-pager, and the press contact.
Support OMLA
Optional donations that keep the registry running, and exactly where the money goes.
Contact
Every inbox — general, legal, press, partners, verification, and the founder directly.
AI disclosure
How AI assistance was used to build this project, what humans decided, and why we say so.
Where to check our work
The roadmap states plainly what is built, staged, and still missing. The Legal Hub holds the operative documents, the authoritative No-Custody & Financial Disclaimer, and the DMCA policy. The compliance page explains how standing is tracked and appealed. And every model's public record — identity, lineage, and compliance state — is inspectable in the registry.