MIT was noble in intent. At platform scale, it became a gift to the extractors. WCL-1.0 preserves the unconditional permissive grant — use it, fork it, deploy it, sell it — and adds a voluntary covenant economics layer that names contributors, recognizes their work, and distributes value transparently. Not MIT with restrictions. MIT with covenant.
Federated node architecture · IPFS anchoring · No dissolution clause. The license that cannot be taken down.
Individual developers are opted in. Enterprise customers who negotiated hard enough get the carve-out. The platform that hosted the world's open source commons for free, built Copilot on the resulting training data, and now harvests behavioral signal from the developers using it. The opt-in by default design is the tell. NotGit.org has the migration cookbook →
MIT was designed for mutual benefit between roughly equal parties. The assumption was: I share with you, you share with me, the commons grows. The assumption held until the platform intermediary entered the picture.
GitHub offered free hosting. The price was not paid by developers — it was paid by Microsoft, who calculated that the training signal embedded in public repositories was worth more than the $7.5 billion acquisition cost. Developers released under MIT before the concept of training data existed as a commercial category.
The Doe v. GitHub class action documented Copilot reproducing identifiable MIT-licensed code without attribution. Microsoft's defense rested on the permissive license. The court found the attribution claims insufficient — because MIT's attribution requirement was never designed to survive at training-data scale.
None of this required conspiracy. The mismatch between the tool and the environment it met is the story. WCL-1.0 is the covenant update for the environment that actually exists.
Identical to MIT. Unconditional. Use it, fork it, modify it, deploy it, sell it. The only enforceable obligation: include the copyright notice and this license text in all copies or substantial portions of the software.
No training data restriction. No commercial use restriction. No copyleft requirement. No revenue share obligation. If WellSpr.ing ceases operations, all WCL-licensed software reverts to MIT automatically. The permissive grant survives everything.
Voluntary. Entered freely or not at all. Respect Mon is the term for voluntary value return — money, contribution, or advocacy given back to work that produced value for you. Not a license fee. Not enforced. An invitation.
Contributions are published in a quarterly ledger. Contributors are named and recognized by work weight, not financial contribution. Allocation is transparent and published. The Wellkeeper distributes with full disclosure.
| Allocation | Default % | Purpose | Adjustable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Named contributors | 40% | Distributed in proportion to merged contribution weight — code, documentation, translation | Yes — contributor may redirect to mission fund |
| Infrastructure | 20% | Hosting, DNS, domain costs, compute for the project | Yes — by contributor direction |
| Civic mission fund | 25% | New WellSpr.ing civic platform development, legal holds, accountability infrastructure | Yes — by contributor direction |
| Wellkeeper stewardship | 15% | Governance, curation, distribution, and maintenance work by Odysseus Melchizedek Shiloh | Named; non-negotiable as a line item |
Allocation reports published quarterly at wellspr.ing/ledger/{project-slug}.
Tiers are based on contribution weight — code merged, documentation written, issues triaged. Respect Mon received does not affect contributor tier.
Add this to your README. The first three lines are the complete legal obligation. The rest is the invitation.
If WellSpr.ing ceases operations, all WCL-licensed software reverts to MIT license automatically. The covenant economics layer depends on the Wellkeeper's continued operation. The legal grant does not.
WCL-1.0 software does not become unlicensed or legally ambiguous if the steward dissolves. It becomes MIT-licensed software. The permissive grant survives everything.
WCL-1.0 collapses to MIT, not to a restricted license. This is the proof that the covenant layer is genuinely voluntary.