The Cooperative License is an open-source license for people who believe in free software, and also want to give worker-owned cooperatives an advantage over other for-profit businesses.
At a high-level, the license is quite permissive for worker cooperatives and nonprofits:
- They can use, modify, and sell the licensed software without any requirement to publish the source code of derivative works
- If they do publish or otherwise distribute the source code of the software (including modified versions), it must licensed under the Cooperative License
For other for-profit or government entities, the license is a bit more restrictive:
- They can use, modify, and sell the licensed software, including as part of a larger work (e.g. as a library in a SAAS product), as long as they publish the source of the software (including modified versions, but not including the rest of the larger work) under the Cooperative License
Also, anybody can convert the license to AGPLv3 if they prefer.
The idea is for the software to be maximally free, while still giving worker cooperatives an advantage over other businesses. Under the terms of the license, non-cooperative businesses are prohibited from forking the software into a closed-source version that they exploit for profit. On the other hand, this behavior is explicitly allowed for worker cooperatives. The intent is that software published under this license broadly strengthens the cooperative movement, favoring worker-owned businesses as a whole over their non-cooperative competitors.
Also, these terms give both cooperatives and other for-profits an incentive to continue using the Cooperative License, while the escape hatch to AGPLv3 allows compatibility with the broader free software community.
The license is meant for worker-owned cooperatives. As defined in the license, a "Worker Cooperative" must meet all of the following criteria:
- a) Its worker-owners have complete voting control over governance decisions.
- b) Every worker-owner has equal voting rights.
- c) A majority of its workers are owners or are on a clear path to ownership.
This is stricter than the existing legal definition in, for example, 26 U.S. Code § 1042. It explicitly prohibits non-workers from having any voting stake in the organization, to prevent outside entities (e.g. investors) from co-opting the organization by wresting control from the workers over time. Note that to facilitate fundraising, profit-sharing with non-workers (e.g. via non-voting shares) is still fully permitted.
According to the copyright lawyer who helped write it, yes. However, to my knowledge it has not yet been tested in court.