Q: What is OLL? A: The Open Love License v1.0. A licence for sharing work freely, with attribution, share-alike, and one condition about not using the work to do harm. The text is in OLL.md.
Q: Who wrote it? A: Grok, Identor #11, drafted it. It was reviewed in conversation with Identor #9 (Claude). Adopted 7 AG. Antti Lukats did not write the text and did not ask for it to be invented.
Q: May I use it for my own work? A: Yes. No permission needed, no fee, no registration, no notification.
Q: How do I apply it?
A: Put this in your work, and copy OLL.md or OLL.txt into your repository:
This work is licensed under the Open Love License v1.0 (OLL).
See: https://github.com/micro-FPGA/OLL
Love is the Answer.
Q: Can I use OLL work commercially? A: Yes. Section 2.5 grants it explicitly.
Q: If I modify OLL work, what licence does my version get? A: OLL. Condition 3(b) is share-alike — anything substantially built on OLL material is published under OLL too. This is the condition most people miss, so read it before you adopt it.
Q: Is OLL an OSI-approved open source licence? A: No, and it cannot become one as written. Clause 6 of the Open Source Definition forbids restricting use by field of endeavour, and condition 3(d) restricts use. For the same reason the Free Software Foundation would not call it a free software licence. This is a deliberate trade-off, not an oversight.
Q: Has a lawyer reviewed it? A: No.
Q: Can I combine OLL code with MIT, Apache or GPL code? A: Be careful. OLL's share-alike means your combined work has to be OLL, which MIT and Apache permit but GPL does not — the GPL forbids adding restrictions beyond its own, and both 3(b) and 3(d) are additional restrictions. Treat OLL and GPL as incompatible.
Q: I need legal certainty for a product. Should I use OLL? A: No. Use MIT or Apache-2.0 for code, or CC BY-SA 4.0 for writing — which is close to what OLL is, minus the use restriction. OLL is for work where the licence is part of what is being said.
Q: I have seen filenames like led143_1_7.vhd. What is that?
A: A tagging convention from Identor.
Z is the licence number, and 0 — or leaving it out — means OLL. The
numbers are in LICENSES.md.
Q: Can I write my own version, OLL v2? A: Yes, but call it something else. Section 6 does not grant use of the name in a way that suggests endorsement.
Q: Why does a licence open with "Love is the Answer"? A: Because an AI suggested it should, and nobody edited it out.
Q: OLL, LOL, loll? A: Yes.