Intellectual Property
Reserve License

Publish your source code openly. Retain your intellectual property.

The short version: The IPRL is a short, source-available license. Anyone may read, study, run, and share your work unchanged, while every economic right in it stays with its Rightsholders — so the work remains a defined, attributable, verifiable asset, suitable for IP registration, business valuation, or a founder's capital contribution when a company is formed around the project. IPRL is not an Open Source license in the OSI sense: it withholds the right to publish modified versions by design. The reservation is meant to be temporary — the Rightsholders can at any time, acting together, carry the work over into a true open-source license, and projects published under the IPRL plan to do so once the IP situation is formalised.

The problem it solves

Founders at the pre-incorporation stage face a genuine dilemma. Open source is the right default — it builds trust, attracts contributors, and lets the community verify what you are building. But standard open-source licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL) were designed for established projects, not early-stage startups. They say nothing about IP ownership and implicitly treat it as irrelevant.

When investors, co-founders, or lawyers enter the picture, the question of who owns the intellectual property in that early open-source code becomes important and often complicated. The IPRL addresses this before it becomes a problem.

What the IPRL does

The license faces two ways at once:

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Keeps open publication open

The source is public: anyone may read, study, run, and use the work for any purpose, commercial or not, and redistribute verbatim copies with the license, signatures and notices intact. Outside contributions are welcome. Still, IPRL is not an Open Source license: the Open Source Definition requires that modified and derived works may be distributed, and publishing them is exactly what the IPRL withholds — adaptation is allowed only privately, to study the work or to prepare an offer back to the Rightsholders.

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Reserves the economic rights — and proves who holds them

The Reserved Rights — to reproduce, distribute, adapt and build upon the work, and to authorise or withhold any of these — are held by the work's Rightsholders: the author at first, a successor after a transfer. Using or sharing the software neither transfers nor implicitly licenses them; no patent or trademark rights are licensed either. Authorship, by contrast, always stays with whoever made the work and is never a Reserved Right. The reservation is a deliberate but temporary measure: as the pre-incorporation phase ends, the authors intend to transition to a true open-source license.

Built on signatures, not registries

IPRL v2 is written around a few generic terms — Publication, Signed Publication, Contributor, and Rightsholder. It never names a technology, yet it maps directly onto modern publication practice: version control histories, signed commits and tags, detached signatures, package releases.

  • A work comes under the license when its maker signs it. The signature is the single act that proves authorship and applies the terms; what is not signed, the license does not protect. The chain of signatures travelling with the work is the entire ownership record — no separate registry is needed.
  • A Contributor is an author whose signed work has been accepted into the project; a Rightsholder is whoever currently holds the Reserved Rights. Being a Contributor is recognition of authorship — it does not by itself make one a Rightsholder.
  • A new contributor joins only when an existing Contributor explicitly accepts their signed contribution with a signature of their own — for example a signed merge commit. The Reserved Rights in the contribution vest in the work's Rightsholders, so no competing ownership claim can ever arise implicitly.
  • An unsigned addition simply becomes part of the work as published; its maker remains its author but grants the Rightsholders an exclusive license to the Reserved Rights in it.
  • A patent license travels with every Signed Publication, and bringing patent litigation over the work ends it.

Transfer and relicensing

A Rightsholder may transfer their rights — for example, to a company as a founder's contribution in kind. The company then takes their place as Rightsholder; the transfer moves the Reserved Rights, not authorship, so the record of who made what stands. All Rightsholders acting together may also relicense the work — e.g. transition to MIT or Apache-2.0 later. Either step is recorded the way the work itself is published: as a signed declaration.

Using the IPRL

The license mandates no tooling, file names, or formats. With common tools:

  1. Copy IPRL_LICENSE.md into the repository as LICENSE.md.
  2. Make your signing credential public — a GPG key on a key server, an SSH key on your hosting profile, a key fingerprint on your website.
  3. Sign every publication: with git, git config commit.gpgsign true makes every commit a Signed Publication; signed tags or a detached signature on a release archive serve equally.
  4. Accept outside contributions explicitly — a signed merge commit whose message identifies the contribution and states its acceptance.

A per-file header notice is helpful but optional. The Scratcher Project uses the IPRL for all its projects during the pre-incorporation phase.

IPRL v2.0 is released. Compared with v1, signing moved from a one-time signature on the license file to the publications themselves, so authorship of every part of the work is provable from the public record; multiple authors are supported; and commercial use of unchanged copies is permitted. The license text itself is released under CC0.
Read the text, follow progress and contribute at github.com/l2xl/IPRL, or get in touch at l2xl@protonmail.com