What the RCL is
The RCL is not an "open source" license in the sense of the Open Source Initiative's definition. It is an open commons license: open to participants who commit to public benefit and non-extractive use, and closed to use that would extract value from places, communities, or living systems without measurable regeneration.
It draws on prior art — the Creative Commons family (attribution, share-alike), Apache 2.0 (patent grant, defensive termination), the OpenRAIL family (use-case restrictions), the Peer Production License (commons reciprocity), and the Local Contexts framework (Indigenous data sovereignty) — combining them into a coherent license-as-membership-contract for a regenerative civilization.
The RCL acknowledges that any metric becomes gameable under enough optimization pressure. Compliance with the license is necessary but not sufficient for regenerative practice. Participants are expected to act in the spirit of regeneration, not merely the letter of the license.
Three tracks of participation
Open to everyone, no registration. Read, study, cite, and teach the work in non-commercial settings, with attribution.
For eligible licensees. Modify, adapt, and distribute derivative works non-commercially, under share-alike and provenance conditions.
By written agreement with the Steward. Adds commercial scope with a Community Dividend returned to the place of origin.
Field-of-use restrictions
These apply to every participant, at every level, and cannot be waived by the Steward:
- Anti-extraction — no use that extracts value from a place without measurable regeneration of the Five Capitals over the same period.
- Anti-greenwashing — no "regenerative," "Verified Living Asset," or "VLAS-conformant" claim without the appropriate certification.
- Indigenous data sovereignty — Indigenous Knowledge is governed exclusively by Local Contexts TK/BC Labels and the CARE Principles, never by this license.
- Prohibited uses — weapons and surveillance systems, discrimination, investor deception, and optimization of extraction industries are excluded.
- FPIC — Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of the relevant Place Community is required for any use operating in a Place.
Place Communities come first
The Place Community of each bioregion touched by a licensed work is a third-party beneficiary of the license, with independent standing to enforce it, to request disclosure of dividend and consent status, and to withdraw consent at any time. The seventh-generation principle is the interpretive standard for ambiguity.
The full license
This page is a human-readable summary. The formal legal text — definitions, gates, grants, reciprocity, termination, and governing law — is the controlling document. Where this summary and the license differ, the license controls.
Read the full RCL v1.0 →Steward: Regenerative Development Corp, transitioning to the VLAS Trust upon its constitution. Acceptable Use Policy: commons.zoen.earth/aup.