Intellectual Property
Reserve License

Publish your source code openly. Retain your intellectual property.

The short version: The IPRL lets you publish source code while explicitly reserving intellectual property ownership — keeping it available as founder's capital if a company is ever formed around the project. The source is freely readable and usable, but IPRL is not an Open Source license in the OSI sense: it deliberately withholds certain freedoms to protect pre-incorporation IP. These restrictions are intentionally temporary — projects published under the IPRL plan to transition to a genuine open-source license 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 does two things simultaneously:

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Allows to publish source code

The source is publicly available: anyone can read, build, and use the software. This transparency is deliberate and important. However, IPRL is not an Open Source license. The Open Source Definition requires that licences permit derived works and impose no restriction on use in any field — conditions IPRL explicitly does not meet, because the IP reservation limits what others can do with modifications and derivative works.

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Reserves IP ownership — for now

The license states that intellectual property rights — patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and the rights to commercialise the work — are reserved by the named author or authors. Using or redistributing the software does not transfer or implicitly license these rights. This reservation is a deliberate but temporary measure: as the project matures and the pre-incorporation phase ends, the authors intend to transition to a true open-source license.

Using the IPRL

The license text is freely available. To apply it to a project, include it as LICENSE in the repository, with the author name or names and date filled in. Add the standard header comment to source files.

The Scratcher Project uses the IPRL for all its projects during the pre-incorporation phase.

The IPRV v1 is available. IPRL v2 currently in progress targeting modern version control based publication.
Follow progress and contribute at github.com/l2xl/IPRL, or get in touch at l2xl@protonmail.com