Open Innovation Licensing
OPAL
The Open Peer Access Licence
A licensing architecture under development for sharing innovation openly while protecting reciprocity, attribution, and value-flow back into the commons.
The problem it solves
Open innovation needs better rules
Open innovation helps people build faster together. But today, innovators are often forced into a bad choice.
Fully open licences allow knowledge to spread, but they can leave little protection against extractive commercial use.
Proprietary licences protect value, but they often lock useful knowledge away from the people and communities who could build on it.
OPAL is being developed for the space between these extremes: a way for knowledge, software, research, designs, methods, and shared technologies to circulate through an inner commons while still creating fair terms for commercial use.
Licensing landscape
Between open and proprietary
OPAL Gradient
Inner Commons
Aligned peers, projects, labs, communities, and purpose-driven organizations can share and improve work together.
Commercial Relationships
Market-facing use can include licence fees, revenue share, attribution, reciprocity duties, and value-flow back into the commons.
OPAL is inspired by dual licensing approaches, but is designed to be more fluid. It maps a gradient between commons sharing and commercial use.
Lineage
Inspired by peer production
OPAL is inspired in part by the Peer Production Licence and the wider commons-based peer production movement supported by our partners at the P2P Foundation. The core idea is powerful: commoners should be able to share freely with other commoners, while commercial actors who benefit from shared work should contribute back.
OPAL takes this idea further by developing a broader licensing architecture for open innovation, including attribution, contribution memory, commercial bridges, derivative rules, and value-flow into shared commons infrastructure.
Philosophy
Share more. Extract less. Advance faster together.
OPAL is based on a simple belief: useful knowledge should move, but it should not be stripped from the people and communities that created it.
When innovators can build on each other's work, everyone moves faster. But when commercial value is created from commons-generated knowledge, some of that value should return to the commons.
This is the principle of transvestment: value generated through market activity is directed back into the shared field, helping fund further innovation, stewardship, and commons infrastructure.
What OPAL is being designed to enable
The stewardship architecture
Commons-first sharing
Aligned peers can share, adapt, and improve useful work together.
Commercial reciprocity
Market-facing use can carry clear terms for payment, revenue share, or contribution back.
Attribution and contribution memory
Creators, funders, contributors, and host communities remain visible as assets evolve.
Derivative stewardship
Improvements and adaptations can carry share-back or reciprocity obligations.
Graduated access
Assets do not need to be only open or closed. Access can depend on trust, purpose, contribution, and use.
Value-flow into the commons
Commercial success can help fund the people, projects, and infrastructure that made the innovation possible.
Development pathway
Under development
OPAL is not finished. It is currently being developed as a legal, economic, and operational framework for reciprocal open innovation. The next steps are:
Refine the architecture
Clarify the access, reciprocity, commercial, derivative, and value-flow logic.
Translate into legal instruments
Work with legal experts to turn the framework into usable licence terms and agreements.
Test with real assets
Pilot OPAL with software, research, designs, methods, hardware, or educational resources.
Build practical presets
Create simple configurations that people can actually understand and use.
Connect to commons infrastructure
Link OPAL assets to operational systems that can track contributors, permissions, agreements, and value-flow over time.
Help shape the next licensing layer for open innovation
OPAL is being developed for creators, researchers, software builders, labs, educators, open hardware projects, regenerative innovators, and purpose-driven organizations that want to share useful work without allowing it to be extracted.