Open Source Guy

MongoDB’s lawsuit against FerretDB has generally been understood as a dispute over FerretDB’s use of the MongoDB name and brand, or over marketing claims such as “MongoDB compatible” and “an alternative to MongoDB.”

Where Japanese IP Advice Can Miss Contracts, Corporate Practice, and Community Norms I regularly receive requests for advice on the use of licenses, primarily Open Source licenses, and often have occasion to provide my own interpretation.

Three years ago, OSI began the process of creating the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID).

Can AI be used to reimplement software with nearly the same functionality, and then even change its license as a result, in what might be described as a form of license washing?

California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), approved by Governor Newsom in October 2025, sets out a statewide age assurance framework for operating systems and app stores.

Copyright issues in AI model training and generated outputs are widely discussed, but less attention is paid to how copyright licenses, the actual mechanism for granting permission, shape these workflows.

Recently, regarding the open-weights AI model “Nemotron 3” released by NVIDIA, there are scattered media reports mistakenly describing it as open source.

When GitHub Copilot first appeared, many developers viewed it as an assistive tool for coding.

When GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021, the fact that its training data included a vast amount of Open Source code publicly available on GitHub attracted significant attention, sparking lively debates regarding licensing.

The Munich I Regional Court has delivered a sweeping victory for GEMA, Germany’s music rights organization, in its lawsuit against OpenAI, the operator of ChatGPT.