[Go Make Things] The Kelp Commons License

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

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I'll finally be releasing some early code for Kelp UI (my UI library for people who love HTML) over the next few days.

The one last thing I've been finalizing before I do is the license.

I knew early on that I didn't want to release this under a traditional open source license like MIT, but I do want users to be able to view, modify, and redistribute code.

Today, I wanted to share the Kelp Commons License: what it is, how it works, and my goals in creating it.

Let's dig in!

The License

Kelp Commons is a Fair-Code License. These work mostly like a traditional open source license, but restrict commercial use, which requires a separate license.

The core of the license is this…

The licensor grants you a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, non-sublicensable, non-transferable license to use, copy, distribute, make available, and prepare derivative works of the software, in each case subject to the limitations below.

You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.

You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the licensor in the software. Any use of the licensor's trademarks is subject to applicable law.

Like a proper open source license, it provides language around patents and liability.

Why a new license?

The Open Source Initiative has a very pro-capitalist view of open source.

From their perspective, any restriction on use disqualifies a license from being open source.

That means a big corporation can use the free labor of small indie creators to make truckloads of money without ever contributing back (with time or money). It also means that big, evil groups can use your code to do or promote horrible things, and you have no recourse.

I believe in the code commons.

I think code is better when people can view it, edit it, improve it, and share it with others. And I also think capitalism destroys the commons through extraction and exploitation, and want a license that fixes that.

Fair compensation for labor

I'm not at all opposed to people using my labor to grow their own businesses and commercial projects.

If my work helps you work better, faster, and make more money, that's awesome! I'm thrilled for you! Truly!

In a perfect world, we'd live in a sharing economy where everyone just had what they needed. But since we don't, I think it's important for small, indie creators to be fairly compensated for their work.

The Kelp Commons License pairs with a separate, commercial license (which I'll be finalizing in the next day or two) that lets me get paid when my code is used in commercial projects.

Revenue-based licensing

I was deeply inspired by KirbyCMS's pricing model, which is based on revenue.

Rather than charging based on the number of users, they charged based on organizational revenue/funding, and allow an unlimited number of users.

That means that a nonprofit with a big team but low revenue is going to pay less than a small but extremely well funded startup rather than the other way around.

For Kelp, I believe I'll be using KirbyCMS's revenue/funding targets:

Up to $1 million USD will cost under $100
Unlimited revenue will cost ~$300 USD
Licenses are per-project/URL

Unlike KirbyCMS, internal use is covered under the Kelp Commons license.

That means that if you use it for an internal scheduling app that only your employees use, you don't have to pay. But if you build your ecommerce platform or SaaS app with it, you would.

Ethical use

Another area where most traditional open source licenses fail is around ethical use.

This first hit my radar when Coraline Ada Ehmke started talking about ethical use licenses about 6 or 7 years ago.

I don't want Kelp used to build sites that promote anti-vax conspiracies or racist, sexist, homophobic bigotry. I don't want it used by weapons manufacturers or ICE.

Under MIT and other OSS licenses, I have no say over that. Under Fair-Code, I do!

I love KirbyCMS's language around this, and incorporated it into Kelp Commons…

Projects that contain misinformation, hate speech or discriminating content based on age, gender, gender identity, race, sexuality, religion, nationality, serious illnesses or disabilities, no matter who authored this content. Misinformation is defined as content that is false or misleading and may lead to significant risk of physical or societal harm.

Use by companies or individuals who:

lobby for, promote, derive a majority of income from, or are significantly invested in:

the production of tobacco or weapons,

any prison or jail operated for profit,

any action or facility that supports or contributes to gambling, adversely addictive behaviors, or deforestation.

lobby against or derive a majority of income from actions that discourage or frustrate:

peace,

access to the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child,

peaceful assembly and association (including worker associations),

a safe environment or action to curtail the use of fossil fuels or to prevent climate change or

democratic processes.

Why not just use Creative Commons?

I actually looked into this initially!

The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license seems like it checks (nearly) all of the boxes, in plain English that's super easy to understand for most people.

But the Creative Commons org recommends against this.

We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software… Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works.

That said, the license text itself is licensed under CC BY-SA. Feel free to copy it, remix it, and adapt it to your own projects.

You can view and fork the full license on GitHub.

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Cheers,
Chris

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