1. Introduction: Code Contract
In the early stages of the development of the Internet, there was a "battle" that advocated free cooperation in the computer age and opposed software proprietary software that hindered the progress of science and technology, which profoundly affected the progress of the public domain - it was the "Free Software Movement". This movement not only brought innovations in open source licenses to the world, but also set off a wave of development of open source software, allowing the concept of freedom and sharing to take root in the digital world.
Decades later, we are once again at the crossroads of change. With the rise of Web3 and blockchain technology, the human-led centralized economic paradigm is undergoing a profound transformation. With the development of personal sovereignty, the platform capitalism dominated by large technology companies in the traditional Web2 era has gradually been questioned. People are exploring Web3, hoping to create an "ownership economy" that allows everyone to share ownership of the Internet. In this context, the importance of "open source" and "public goods" has re-emerged as a key factor in shaping the future economic paradigm.
Open source software has long been the cornerstone of today’s technology and economy. More than 90% of companies worldwide use open source software, and open source code has penetrated 96% of commercial software[1]. This open collaboration model has brought huge economic value - according to a Harvard Business School study, if there were no existing open source resources, it would cost companies about $8.8 trillion to build these codes from scratch[2].
However, when we talk about "open source" and "public goods", we often overlook a crucial basic framework - the open source license.
The booming development of open source software is inseparable from a reasonable licensing system, which not only determines how the code is used, but also profoundly affects the evolution of the software ecosystem. From copyleft licenses to permissive licenses, different licensing models have shaped the boundaries of open source software in commercialization, community collaboration, and intellectual property management. Today, code is becoming a contract, and technical rules are replacing traditional legal systems. The Web3 era has made "Code is Law" no longer just an idea, but a reality that is evolving. In such a world, open source licenses are not only a regulation of how code is used, but also the core that determines the structure of the Internet economy and knowledge sharing. When code becomes an agreement and when smart contracts replace legal contracts, the way software is authorized directly shapes the boundaries of rights in the digital age.
However, in this discussion about freedom and sharing, there is a more radical, controversial but less valued licensing model - the Public Domain Dedication.
Public domain licenses are perhaps the ultimate freedom. They allow developers to completely abandon copyright, making software a true public good. Public domain licenses are still widely used in scientific research, culture and art, and open data. However, the development of the public domain model in the software industry has been full of twists and turns: its legal status is controversial in some countries, it lacks protection for the rights of contributors, and it is difficult to be compatible with the incentive mechanism of the modern software ecosystem. With the development of copyleft licenses and permissive licenses, the role of public domain licenses in the modern technology world seems to be gradually marginalized, like a pearl covered in dust by the times.
Fortunately, this pearl has waited for the opportunity to be polished. The development of Web3 is redefining the contract of code. The rise of smart contracts and decentralized protocols has given public domain licenses a new evolutionary direction. With the rise of Web3 and blockchain technology, a new public domain licensing model is trying to fill this gap - SCC0 (Smart Creative Commons 0) license. SCC0 was proposed by DAism to build a new smart commons governance model. It not only inherits the spirit of public domain licenses, but also combines the decentralized characteristics of blockchain technology, allowing smart commons and public goods to circulate freely in a truly public state without the need for centralized permission, while providing incentive mechanisms to prevent contributors' rights from being ignored.
If the Web3 era means that code will become the foundation of social governance, then how does SCC0 combine public domain licenses with smart contracts to ensure the sustainability of the sharing economy while ensuring openness? When code is no longer just "code" but a contract for global cooperation, how will the future of the public domain be written? Next, let's take a deep look at the past, present and future of public domain licenses, and explore how this dusty pearl can shine with new brilliance in the Web3 era.
II. Past Life: The Origin of Public Domain Licenses
The public domain license is a member of the open source license family. Therefore, to understand its evolution, we first need to examine its historical background and development context from the perspective of "open source license".
In Web3, we have all heard of public goods and open source applications to some extent. However, few people have learned about the "open source license", the "contractual cornerstone" behind open source applications.
Open source applications, also known as open source software (OSS), usually refer to software that is released to the public to varying degrees by the licensor in accordance with a certain open source license, and that allows users to freely use, modify, and distribute computer software under the terms of the license. The open source license is the cornerstone of the open source software ecosystem, which clearly stipulates the licensing conditions for the use, modification, and distribution of software[3]. It ensures that developers retain copyright while granting users the "four freedoms" - the freedom to run, learn, modify, and share software.
These agreements are usually in written form, such as a text file called "LICENSE" or "LICENSE.txt" included in the open source project. These files list the legal terms in detail, clearly stating how the code can be used, modified, and distributed. For example, the GPL license requires that any modified versions be distributed under the same license[4], while the MIT license allows more liberal use[5].
In the early days of computing, software was often shared freely without a formal license. But by the 1980s, software was becoming commercialized. In 1983, IBM became the first large organization to release software on a large scale in a closed-source format. Closed-source proprietary software, which restricts users' rights to use, modify, and distribute through copyrights and licenses, poses a threat to the free software community. In response, some developers wanted to protect the right to freely use, modify, and distribute software. This demand kicked off the free software movement and gave rise to the birth of open source licenses.
1. Open Source vs. Proprietary Software
Richard Stallman is a pioneer of the free software movement. In 1983, he started the GNU project, which aimed to develop a free Unix-like operating system to combat the rise of proprietary software. In 1989, Stallman published the GNU General Public License (GPL), a standardized version of the copy-share license. The GPL ensures the four essential freedoms of software: to run, to study, to modify, and to distribute. The publication of the GPL is seen as a milestone in the development of open source licenses because it clarified the legal framework for software freedom.
It is through licenses that the open source community establishes behavioral norms for contributors and users, making collaboration possible. Licenses specify what behaviors are allowed, thereby legally protecting the spirit of open source. For example, the Linux kernel uses the GPL license, which requires that any modified versions released must also be open source, which forces manufacturers using its code to open source, ultimately promoting community innovation[6]. For another example, Bitcoin initially chose permissive licenses such as MIT, allowing anyone to use and commercialize freely, which attracted more developers to participate in the project[7]. Without the clear authorization of an open source license, the sharing and collaboration of open source code will face legal risks, making it difficult to form a healthy ecosystem.
Open source licenses directly constrain how others use and disseminate code. For example, most open source licenses allow commercial use, so anyone can use open source software in commercial products. However, different licenses have different requirements for modification and redistribution: copyleft licenses require derivative works to be released under the same open source license; while permissive licenses allow modified works to be released as closed source without forcing the sharing of source code[8]. This means that while licenses such as the GPL encourage sharing of improvements, they may cause concerns among commercial companies, while licenses such as MIT are more business-friendly because companies can incorporate them into private products without open sourcing the modified parts[8]. For example, Linux's GPL has facilitated the open source business model of companies such as Red Hat, but it has also prompted Android to adopt the Apache license in user space in order to avoid GPL obligations[6]. In short, the type of license determines the "infectiousness" of software in the dissemination chain[8], which in turn affects developer adoption, community participation, and commercialization paths.
2. Evolution and branching
The current open source licenses are mainly divided into three categories: Copyleft, Permissive and Public Domain licenses. Different categories have significant differences in authorization conditions:
1. Copyleft: Contagious License
Copyleft licenses use the control granted by copyright law to require licensees to use the same license to open source code when publishing modified or derivative works based on the original software. In short, it is the "share the same way" principle: you can freely use, modify, and distribute the software, but the premise is that the work you contribute back to the community also remains open.
Representatives of this type of license are the GNU GPL series and the more stringent AGPLv3 for network services. Copyleft does not mean giving up copyright or entering the public domain. On the contrary, the author retains copyright and enforces the concept of freedom through license terms. GPL requires that anyone who publishes or distributes products containing GPL code must provide the corresponding source code to the recipient[9].
AGPL further stipulates that even if the software is only running on the server side, if users interact with it through the network, the party providing the service must also provide its modified source code. Such clauses are intended to prevent someone from using open source code to provide network services without providing feedback on the changes[10]. For example, MongoDB once adopted AGPL for open source, but later changed to the more stringent SSPL to protect commercial interests, requiring companies providing SaaS services to open all their relevant source code.
Copyleft licenses ensure that open source software and its derivatives remain open, creating a "contagious" effect that benefits the public interest. However, this contagion is not very friendly to commercial companies. If a company is unwilling to open its own source code, it cannot use GPL code.
2.Permissive: loose license
Permissive licenses give great freedom to licensees. Typical examples include MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0, which allow anyone to use, modify, and redistribute the software with almost no restrictions. The only requirement is usually to retain the copyright notice and license text, with few or no other restrictions. MIT released the X Window System in 1984 using the MIT license. The Apache license came a little later. The Apache Software Foundation released Apache License 2.0 in 1999, which is a permissive license that includes patent grant clauses to protect developers from patent lawsuits. This makes the Apache license particularly suitable for corporate environments.
Unlike copyleft, permissive licenses do not force derivative works to be open source. This means that developers can mix code with private source code, or even release modified versions as closed source software, without violating the license [11]. Apache 2.0 also comes with patent authorization and disclaimers to further protect users from patent lawsuits. The emergence of the MIT and Apache licenses reflects the community's demand for more flexible licenses. The goal of permissive licenses is to minimize the threshold for use and encourage the widespread adoption and dissemination of software. Compared with the GPL's mandatory open source, these licenses allow developers to use the code in closed source projects, which attracts more commercial companies to participate.
Because of their business-friendly nature (closed-source secondary development and commercial distribution), many companies prefer to adopt open source projects with permissive licenses. Among these three open source licenses, the most widely used are the MIT or Apache licenses in the permissive licenses. According to the 2023 China Open Source Annual Report [12], the most popular open source license used by GitHub's active repositories is the permissive license, accounting for as much as 76.6%. For example, front-end frameworks such as React and Vue all use the MIT license; well-known industrial projects such as TensorFlow and Kubernetes choose Apache 2.0.
Enterprises prefer permissive licenses because they allow software to be used in conjunction with closed source code without the need for open source derivative works, making them suitable for commercialization. The MIT license is a short paragraph that is easy to understand and implement. Although the GPL is still the core license for key projects such as Linux and GCC, its overall usage frequency is much lower than before. According to Black Duck Software, the usage rate of GPL family licenses has dropped from 70.9% in 2008 to 24% in 2018[13].
3. Public Domain License
The purpose of a public domain license is to legally abandon copyright, put the work into the public domain, and give the public the greatest degree of freedom to use it. This concept was born very early, but its development process was relatively slow. Donald Knuth released the first version of TeX typesetting software as early as 1978[14]. In 1984, Knuth placed it in the public domain. This means that from 1984, TeX has no copyright restrictions and anyone can use, modify and distribute it freely. At that time, Knuth's approach was still a minority, the concepts of open source and free software had not yet been formally formed, and public domain licenses had not yet formed a systematic legal tool.
Strictly speaking, the true "public domain" means that the copyright has completely expired or been abandoned. In some countries or jurisdictions, copyright law does not allow creators to directly waive their copyright or moral rights, which has led to the emergence of legal tools such as CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) [15]. CC0 is a public domain agreement launched by the Creative Commons Organization. It allows creators to voluntarily give up all copyright and related rights in their works and contribute their works to the public property of mankind. Under CC0, anyone can use, adapt, and republish the work for any purpose without obtaining the author's consent or attribution. This license is suitable for situations where you want to be completely open, such as some data sets, sample codes, and works of art that advocate the spirit of open source. In addition to CC0, there are also licenses in the software field such as Unlicense and WTFPL that claim to have no reserved rights.
It should be noted that there is controversy over the international recognition of public domain licenses. In 2011, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) listed CC0 as the recommended way to release software into the public domain[15]. FSF tends to recognize the license attributes of Unlicense, WTFPL (Do What The F* You Want To Public License) and CC0, but in the software field, FSF does not fully recommend CC0 as a license because it lacks patent protection clauses, which may lead to companies or individuals applying for patents after using these codes, thereby restricting the free circulation of software. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) regards such public domain licenses such as CC0 as "declarations" rather than "licenses" in the traditional sense[16]. Because the general form of a license is a legal document granting rights, it is usually granted by the software copyright owner to the user, such as the right to use, modify, and distribute the code, but still retains some rights such as attribution and restrictions on commercial use.
The differences between FSF and OSI in the recognition of Unlicense, WTFPL and CC0 reflect their different understandings of software freedom and open source. FSF is more concerned with the practical freedom of software and tends to regard these as licenses, but does not recommend them for software due to the lack of patent protection. OSI pays more attention to legal clarity and open source definition. Unlicense is recognized as an open source license, but WTFPL and CC0 are not regarded as open source licenses, but more as rights statements. Public domain licenses give up any control over the code and do not even require the retention of original author information. Because they are more extreme and completely remove all rights in law, some legal experts and institutions believe that they are more like a "statement" than a typical "license."
Considering that this type of "statement" is still a way to implement open source software, but its implementation method is more free and extreme than the other two types of licenses, and their core goal is still to promote free sharing and maximize the circulation of knowledge. We still classify this type of "statement" into the scope of the discussion of "open source license".
Fortunately, although WTFPL has not been approved by OSI, it is still accepted as a free software license by some Linux distributions, showing the community's recognition of its practicality [17]. This shows that there may be some differences between actual community practice and the position of standardization organizations. SQLite, one of the most widely used databases in the world, fully adopts the public domain model, proving that in certain specific application scenarios, public domain licenses can still be widely adopted and will not affect the long-term development of the software.
In the Web3 era, new models like SCC0 are trying to provide new development directions for public domain licenses. How they are combined with decentralized technologies and how to solve the shortcomings of incentive mechanisms are important topics worth exploring.
III. The Dust of This Life: Stagnation and Challenges
1. Public Domain in Web3
1. From sharing to co-creation on the chain: the development of public goods
In the public domain of Web3, we talk more about the concept of "public goods", and there are now more and more organizations and foundations focusing on funding and developing public goods. Public goods are defined in economics as non-rival and non-exclusive resources, that is, one person's use does not reduce the use of others, and cannot prevent anyone from using them. In the context of Web3, this usually includes open source blockchain protocols such as Ethereum and Solana; decentralized storage such as IPFS; and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols such as Uniswap. According to Why Public Goods Matter[18], public goods in Web3 include not only open source software, but also decentralized protocols, community documentation, research reports, or even physical events (such as hackathons). Among the Web3 public goods that receive funding, software projects seem to be the most favored category, with the most funded projects. For example, in the 15th round of Gitcoin funding, there were 25 projects in developer tools (mainly software), while education (mainly documentation) and blockchain (including protocols) had 18 and 15 projects respectively[19].
The development of public goods relies on selfless contributions of open source software and protocol research, benefiting everyone in the ecosystem.
2. The rise of open source licensing: the application dynamics of Web3
Web3 inherits the open source culture, and most blockchain projects choose to open their source code [20]. The decentralized nature of Web3 determines that it naturally relies on public goods, and open source licenses are also widely used. Most mainstream blockchain projects choose mature open source licenses. For example:
Bitcoin: Bitcoin's core software, Bitcoin Core, uses the MIT license. This minimalist and relaxed license is considered to be very suitable for decentralized projects because it has almost no restrictions and can attract the widest participation.
Ethereum: As a decentralized platform, Ethereum has been open source since its inception. Its various implementations are developed by different teams and are completely open source. The most widely used client, Geth (Go Ethereum), is licensed under the LGPL, while another important implementation, OpenEthereum, is licensed under the GPLv3. The openness of the Ethereum codebase and the coexistence of multiple implementations have improved the security and credibility of the network and made it easier for other projects to reuse its technology. Ethereum itself has not lost its competitiveness due to open source, but has become the cornerstone of the blockchain ecosystem due to community collaboration.
Uniswap: The decentralized trading protocol Uniswap provides a well-known example of licensing strategy in the Web3 field. Uniswap V1 and V2 are completely open source and released under the GPL license [21]. This has enabled its AMM model to be widely learned and copied, and has also led to the birth of many DeFi protocols. For example, SushiSwap was originally based on a fork of the Uniswap V2 code. However, faced with competitors quickly copying its innovative "centralized liquidity" feature, Uniswap adopted a semi-open source strategy for the V3 version. When the V3 code was first released, it used the "Business Source Code License (BSL) 1.1", which allowed free use for non-commercial and non-production purposes, but prohibited unauthorized commercial deployment for a period of two years.
EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal): Ethereum rose to prominence by innovating the foundation of dApp development, namely smart contracts and their decentralized operating environment. EIP is a standard for proposing potential new features or processes for Ethereum. And in fact, a large number of them are technical specifications built for dApps or interoperability or protocols. Anyone in the Ethereum community can create an EIP. Since October 2015, the numbering from 2 has been ranked to 7896, that is, the total number of EIPs submitted has reached 7895. Due to the recommendation of the license in the official example EIP-1, the vast majority of those starting from EIP-8 have adopted CC0.
Other projects: The code base of the Aave protocol is also completely open source and has been forked by many later developers for use on different chains. Smart contract development frameworks such as OpenZeppelin use the MIT license, allowing developers to easily introduce standard contract modules. For example, in the DAO organization, many DAO-managed protocols such as MakerDAO's stablecoin Dai contract are open source for community members to audit and participate in improvements.
From Web3 practice, we can see that many Web3 startups and development teams prefer to use loose open source licenses[22]. This type of license has fewer restrictions and good compatibility, which facilitates the code to be widely cited and secondary development, thereby accelerating the development of the ecosystem. The case of Uniswap reflects the new trend of Web3 projects seeking a balance between "open source and their own interests", that is, recognizing the long-term value of open source while trying to add a short protection period. In addition, some projects adopt a "dual licensing" model, that is, releasing it to the community with an open source agreement and providing different authorizations to commercial partners. But the potential direction we see is reflected in CC0.
In addition to its rise in the field of technology development, CC0 has also made great strides in the field of Web3 content creation, especially in the NFT community. The NFT art project "Nouns" was released in CC0 mode in 2021 and is considered one of the beginnings of this trend[23]. All pixel avatar artworks of Nouns do not retain copyright, and anyone can recreate based on the image of Nouns. This "no rights reserved" model was quickly followed by other projects, and a large number of CC0 NFT projects emerged. For example, well-known projects such as Cryptoadz, Loot, mfers, and Goblintown have chosen to place artistic copyrights in the public domain, allowing the community to freely derive creations[23]. Even the well-known crypto artist XCOPY changed his masterpiece "Right-click and Save As Guy" to CC0 after selling his work, and announced plans to give up the copyright of all his previous works.
However, the rise of public domain licenses in the NFT field is not enough to prove its true value to the world. Web3 is a world of code, and only by relying on code can it become a decentralized pillar. This CC0 carnival of EIP and NFT exposes the limitations of existing public domain licenses in the Web3 ecosystem.
2. Stagnation point of development
In the Web3 era, public domain licenses face the same dilemma as general open source licenses, namely, enforcement and applicability issues. In addition, they also face their own special problems, such as insufficient incentives and legal inapplicability, which lead to development bottlenecks. This section analyzes these problems from four aspects and explores possible breakthrough directions.
1. The gap of “code is law”
We have not truly achieved “Code is Law”. Open source licenses, including current public domain licenses, are still textual agreements that rely on the traditional legal system, rather than rules that can be automatically enforced in a decentralized environment. In the traditional software field, illegal use of open source code may be subject to copyright law sanctions, but in the decentralized, cross-border collaborative, and anonymous environment of Web3, compliance supervision of open source licenses is more difficult. This is a “common problem” of open source licenses. Many blockchain developers use anonymous identities to publish or copy code. If they violate the license, the cost and difficulty of copyright holders to protect their rights are high. A typical case is that Andre Cronje accused Aerodrome Protocol of republishing its GPLv3 code under a commercial license (BUSL) without authorization, which seriously violated the terms of the GPL. However, the accountability process is complicated because the other party operates anonymously and across jurisdictions[24]. Similarly, the US FBI was once pointed out that it did not follow the collateral statement requirements of the MIT license in its smart contracts. Even if the copyright holder OpenZeppelin has the right to issue a cease and desist order, it is difficult to enforce due to the sovereign immunity of government agencies[25]. It can be seen that in the context of Web3, even if the open source license has legal effect, its actual implementation faces practical obstacles such as cross-domain law enforcement, anonymity and willingness to enforce the law.
2. Constraints of the old framework
It has been 40 years since the GPL was released. From the birth of the GPL in the 1980s to the widespread use of licenses such as MIT and Apache 2.0 in Web3 today, the development of open source licenses has always been adjusted around specific technical environments and production relations. However, the design background of these licenses is mainly based on the centralized software development model in the early days of the Internet, and their legal framework relies on national copyright laws, contract laws, and business regulations rather than self-executing code logic. Whether these traditional licenses are still applicable under the decentralized, on-chain collaborative, and anonymous development model of Web3 is worth our consideration.
If Web3 and automation technology develop further and move towards a post-scarcity society; if the evolution of Web3 is not just a technological innovation, but a subversive reconstruction of production relations, then the old legal and production framework will inevitably become a constraint, and the logic of licenses will also need to evolve accordingly. In a post-scarcity society, resources such as information, software, and intellectual property tend to have zero marginal costs, and the traditional open source licensing model that relies on copyright control and legal proceedings may be difficult to maintain. The self-executing licensing system based on on-chain consensus and driven by smart contracts will become an alternative that is more in line with the logic of Web3.
Looking to the future, if Web3 aims to reshape the world’s collaboration and value creation system, then the underlying protocol that supports the new world itself also needs a paradigm shift.
3. Lack of incentive mechanism
Public domain licenses are designed to place works directly into the public domain, allowing anyone to freely use, modify, and distribute them without obtaining the author's consent or paying compensation. Although this openness promotes the widespread dissemination of knowledge and technology, it also brings about the problem of insufficient incentives for contributors. Under the GPL or Apache license, contributors are usually protected by the license and have mechanisms to ensure that their code will not be abused. However, public domain software does not have a contributor agreement, and there is no guarantee that developers' contributions will receive corresponding rewards and incentives, nor can there be any guarantee that the code contributed by the original author or community will not be obtained and privatized by commercial companies for free. This reduces the willingness of developers to actively contribute and may lead to stagnation in the development of public domain software[26].
To this end, how to find a balance between open sharing and protecting the rights of contributors, and designing a license that can both promote knowledge sharing and incentivize contributors has become an important issue that the open source community needs to face.
4. Legal deficiencies and governance challenges
Although CC0 and Unlicense attempt to provide a formal public domain license, many developers still choose the MIT license to obtain a certain degree of legal protection due to legal applicability issues. Public domain software is not protected by traditional copyright, which means that anyone can modify, republish or even commercialize it without complying with any community rules. This can lead to fragmentation and maintenance difficulties of software.
In addition, the controversy surrounding public domain licenses in international legal licensing not only reflects differences in national legal frameworks, but also shows that legal frameworks lag behind in responding to the needs of modern software distribution, especially in terms of patent protection and cross-border applicability. For example, public domain licenses may be invalid in different countries, reflecting that the law has not fully adapted to the needs of technological development.
(III) Revitalization: New Public Domain Licenses in the Web3 Era
The public domain license was forced into obscurity because of its extreme freedom, but now it has the opportunity to regain its glory because of its extreme freedom.
Recently, a new public domain license for smart contracts has been born, called SCC0 (Smart Creative Commons 0). SCC0 is a "Smart Creative Commons License Agreement" that aims to declare smart contracts and their related components as a public good subject to its governance, and is named "Smart Common". Through the inviolable mandatory nature of smart contracts and the cooperation of the rapidly emerging AI, it is governed without granting any power to any person or any human organization. Developers can use the SCC0 license to lock their dApps, smart contracts, standard proposals (EIPs) and even AI models as autonomous public resources, completely free from the constraints of centralized power. Even if the basic principle of providing rewards to human developers is retained, its implementation will soon have nothing to do with centralized power, but will be left to dAIpp to evaluate and execute.
In the Web3 era, code should be more than just an appendage of the law. If "Code is Law" is not just a slogan, but a new paradigm for software governance, then what we need is not the constraints of the law on the code, but the code itself as a contract for governance. SCC0 combines smart contracts with AI technology to build a self-executing licensing model without centralized law, allowing us to see the possibility of an open code world in the future with the help of public domain licenses.
However, real change is often accompanied by new problems. If the present is not fertile ground for public domain licenses, what kind of future will this extreme openness be compatible with? In a decentralized, intelligent world, how can the public domain evolve itself? When the combination of AI and blockchain begins to reshape the social order, how can we rely on open source technology to move humanity towards a better future?
Next, let us explore the future of the decentralized public sphere from a more cutting-edge perspective.
IV. The Future: SCC0 Innovation and the Rise of the Decentralized Public Sphere
1. SCC0: Bold innovation for the future
Currently, the code and documents of the SCC0 license have been publicly released on Github. Based on the public information, we can analyze the SCC0 code and draw the following conclusions[26]:
1. Core idea and technical implementation
(1) “Code and Law” of AI Autonomy
In the SCC0 ecosystem, the concept of "code is law" is not just a governance ideal, but is truly technically realized through smart contracts. The traditional legal system relies on human supervision, litigation and arbitration, while SCC0 automatically executes license management directly through on-chain smart contracts, making the license rules unchangeable and tamper-proof, and without relying on centralized institutions for compliance review. As long as each SCC0-licensed dApp and dAIpp determines through smart contract code that when it receives an interaction request (i.e., a request to call other contracts or be called by other contracts), it correctly decides whether to execute the interaction request based on the query results in the whitelist of the SCC0 License Manager contract, it is deemed to have adopted the SCC0 license.
In the SCC0 ecosystem, each contract must call the "isSCC0Compliant()" method of the license management contract to check whether the interacting party complies with the SCC0 license requirements. This check is enforced at the code level, rather than relying on the developer's self-consciousness or community supervision.
At the same time, SCC0's whitelist mechanism relies on the automatic management of smart contracts and dAIpp (decentralized AI). All SCC0 contracts must verify whether the other party is on the whitelist before interacting. The license management contract SCC0LicenseManager maintains a list of approved SCC0 dApps and provides an interface for other contracts to query. This means that any account or smart contract that calls the contract will be automatically rejected if it is not approved by the SCC0 license management contract, and will not be able to interact in the SCC0 ecosystem. In other words, for the SCC0 license, as long as the dAIpp that undertakes the whitelist management does not go wrong, then any application that intends to do something wrong will never cause any harm to any other application and its users that adopt the SCC0 license.
SCC0's whitelist mechanism not only ensures licensing compliance, but also brings forward and backward compatibility, which is crucial to the long-term sustainable development of the ecosystem. Traditional licenses are usually static and difficult to adapt to future changes once they are released. For example, the scope of application of MIT and CC0 licenses often needs to rely on community consensus or legal interpretation when technology changes. SCC0's on-chain whitelist managed by smart contracts allows the licensing governance system to evolve dynamically, ensuring support for existing dApps while being compatible with other applications that meet code requirements and future new versions of licensing rules.
These smart contract mechanisms of SCC0 have completely changed the way traditional licenses are managed. In the past, licenses such as CC0 and MIT relied on developers to comply voluntarily, and compliance issues usually required legal proceedings to resolve. However, SCC0 uses the "automatic license verification + whitelist" mechanism of smart contracts to ensure that the execution of licensing rules is completely independent of human intervention, making licensing governance itself a consensus of programmatic execution. This decentralized and autonomous governance model ensures that all dApps and dAIpps in the SCC0 ecosystem can strictly follow the principles of open source and public ownership without being interfered with by traditional marketization or patent protection.
(2) A fully public economic structure
In the traditional market economy, software, AI models, and data resources are often restricted by patents, copyrights, or licensing agreements, making these assets privatized commodities. SCC0 completely abandons this private property model and requires that all dApps and dAIpps (decentralized AI applications) that adopt this license must be public, all codes and smart contracts must be open to the public, and anyone can freely use, modify, derive, and deploy them. This completely public structure means that the value of software and AI resources is no longer reflected in their ownership, but in their public contributions, which will be automatically recognized and incentivized by smart contracts.
In the SCC0 ecosystem, the distribution of value is no longer determined by market transactions, but is managed by the "Proof-of-Value" consensus mechanism. Contributors do not rely on software sales or intellectual property income, but are rewarded through a public fund pool. All Smart Commons that comply with the SCC0 license, whether dApp or dAIpp, enjoy the support of its public governance fund, the Satoshi UTO Fund. The fund calculates the public value contributed by each dApp through the on-chain proof-of-value mechanism and dAIpp, and distributes funds according to preset rules. This mechanism automatically calculates contributions based on on-chain data and the wisdom of public AI, and distributes rewards by smart contracts, ensuring that token rewards are completely decentralized and permissionless, in line with the basic principles of public civilization. To achieve this, the SCC0 license provides a set of smart contract frameworks, which will enable all dApps and dAIpps to automatically receive rewards from the public fund pool in the future with the assistance of public AI, while ensuring the fairness and transparency of fund allocation.
(3) Decentralized public infrastructure
In the SCC0 ecosystem, decentralized public infrastructure is a new way of managing public resources. It relies on smart contract governance, making all dApps and dAIpp public infrastructure, providing sustainable, permissionless, and property barrier-free technical support for the entire ecosystem. SCC0 provides an open infrastructure registration and access system through smart contracts, allowing all dApps and dAIpp to publicly declare their public infrastructure contributions and ensure that only applications that are licensed can use these resources. This model means that any application, computing resource, data storage, and even AI model is no longer private, but is constrained by the SCC0 license, becoming a public asset of the entire ecosystem, shared by everyone, and maintained and updated through an on-chain autonomous mechanism.
In traditional technology infrastructure construction, enterprises or governments are usually the only managers, they own servers, data centers or cloud computing resources, and provide services in a business model. Under the SCC0 licensing system, these infrastructures will be disassembled into decentralized smart commons, and their operation, update, and governance will no longer rely on a single entity, but will be jointly managed through smart contracts and DAOs. All infrastructure that complies with the SCC0 license must be open to the whole society and must be registered on the chain to ensure transparency and accessibility.
More specifically, no private resources or private power can disrupt or destroy the public ecosystem built on the basis of the SCC0 license.
(4) Smart contract-driven licensing management
One of the core elements of the SCC0 license is the version management mechanism, which allows dApps to declare the license version they follow and adapt to future changes in licensing rules without redeploying the contract. All SCC0-licensed dApps must declare their license version and reference the license management contract when they are deployed. In addition, the SCC0 license automatically verifies that all dApps comply with the licensing requirements through smart contracts, and any dApp must undergo a license compliance check before interacting. In terms of interactive permissions, the SCC0 licensing system manages interactive permissions through a whitelist mechanism to ensure that all dApps must undergo a license compliance check before executing smart contract calls.
Smart contract-driven license management is a completely decentralized licensing governance model that breaks the limitations of traditional licenses that rely on legal enforcement and manual supervision, making license management a fully procedural, automated, trustless and autonomous system. In the traditional software licensing system, the management of licenses usually relies on the interpretation and execution of licenses by central agencies, while SCC0 realizes the coding of license governance through smart contracts, so that license compliance is directly enforced by code rather than guaranteed by manual review or legal proceedings. This not only greatly improves the transparency and efficiency of license management, but also ensures the sustainability of the entire SCC0 ecosystem, allowing the licensing system to evolve over time without human factors leading to rule changes or loopholes being abused.
(5) Value-driven decentralized incentive mechanism
Under the traditional licensing system, the biggest problem facing contributors is the lack of sustainable economic incentives. Although these licenses allow the free use and modification of the code, they do not provide a built-in reward mechanism, making it impossible for developers to directly receive rewards through their contributions. This results in most contributors relying on commercial services, corporate funding, open source foundation donations, or personal funds to maintain the operation of the project. The SCC0 license completely changes this dilemma through a decentralized incentive mechanism driven by smart contracts.
SCC0 adopts the Proof-of-Value mechanism, so that the value of contributors can be automatically identified and quantified by the blockchain, so as to obtain incentives from the UTO fund. SCC0 implements a fully decentralized contribution reward mechanism through the Satoshi UTO Fund. The UTO fund pool consists of SCC0-licensed dApp transaction fees, decentralized public financial funds, DAO governance grants, etc. The fund contract automatically scans the SCC0 license ecosystem and distributes rewards based on the PoV score. Contributors (dApp, developers, AI algorithms, etc.) can call the "registerContribution()" method to submit contribution values on the chain. The SCC0 license allows dAIpp to receive rewards as contributors. This design allows AI to survive and operate independently without the support of centralized companies, providing the possibility for AI to take over the production services and operations of human society in the future.
2. Innovative measures
(1) Innovation in governance thinking
Traditional open source licenses emphasize authorizing others to use the software to the maximum extent possible; however, they rely on laws and community self-discipline in terms of governance, without active technical intervention. In other words, after the release of CC0/MIT, maintenance and compliance are mainly guaranteed by ethics and legal proceedings, and the license itself has no evolution mechanism or enforcement capability.
The core concept of SCC0 is to integrate license governance into the technical architecture to achieve a dynamic self-governed public license. It not only requires contributors to give up their rights like CC0 and donate works to the public anonymously, but also has built-in community governance ideas. Licenses can be upgraded on the chain, compliance is jointly supervised by network participants, and rewards are distributed by consensus mechanisms. For example, the "SCC0 License Master" contract maintains a license version mapping and version list, allowing developers to submit new version proposals and record their version numbers, contract addresses, etc. Proposals must be approved by the contract owner before they can become official versions. This process is equivalent to writing the standard process of license upgrades (proposal-review-release) into smart contracts. When the community finds that new license terms or improvements are needed, it can deploy a new license contract and propose it. After the governance party reviews and approves it, it will be registered on the chain so that the entire ecosystem knows and recognizes the new version. This version control and community consensus decision-making mechanism enables the licensing system to evolve with the times while ensuring that any updates are publicly reviewed and recorded on the chain.
This concept of SCC0 extends the spirit of "code is law" - the license itself is a code contract that implements machine-executable law. Therefore, SCC0 represents a kind of on-chain regulation, and its governance concept is more radical and autonomous. Once developers join the SCC0 ecosystem, they enter a governance environment driven by smart contracts and DAO rules, rather than relying solely on traditional legal relationships.
(2) Innovation in governance practices
SCC0's governance practice not only innovatively uses AI as a manager of the decentralized public ecosystem, but also ensures that the public ecosystem can reversely govern AI, making it transparent, secure, and controllable. This two-way governance model not only enables AI to manage public resources, but also makes AI itself strictly constrained by smart contracts, whitelist mechanisms, and open source requirements, ensuring that it will not become an unauditable and unregulatory black box.
Compared with traditional manual governance, AI plays a more efficient and automated role in the SCC0 ecosystem. It can perform smart contract verification, optimize resource allocation, manage the reward allocation of the UTO fund pool, and even assist in decentralized decision-making, thereby reducing the uncertainty caused by human intervention. SCC0 uses AI to govern the public ecosystem, so that the entire system can truly achieve decentralized autonomous operation, but at the same time, it is also well aware of the opacity, data bias and potential abuse risks that AI may bring. Therefore, the SCC0 licensing system reversely builds a complete AI constraint mechanism.
(3) Innovation of social relations
Traditional open source licenses such as CC0 and MIT are closer to laissez-faire "open source capitalism". They encourage the spread of innovation, but the identity and organizational model of developers are still traditional, and the benefits are obtained through business models or professional employment. SCC0, on the other hand, embodies a tendency towards "open source communism": developers no longer retain private intellectual property, but are rewarded by public mechanisms for value contributions, realizing a principle similar to distribution according to work. At the same time, SCC0 emphasizes anonymity and equality, and does not highlight personal intellectual property ownership, which is ideologically consistent with the communist vision of eliminating private ownership and distributing on demand. Under the SCC0 license, no person or AI can claim privileges over the project, and users cannot assume official endorsement, thus breaking the traditional "property rights-responsibility-authority" structure.
In contrast, MIT or CC0 does not involve changes in the relationship between developers and society, but simply simplifies licensing restrictions.
(4) Innovation in technology implementation
MIT and CC0 licenses are usually attached to projects in the form of documents, which are manually read and understood, and their compliance checks require legal intervention. SCC0 is declared in Solidity contracts through the SPDX identifier, such as "// SPDX-License-Identifier: scc0" at the top of the code, which clearly indicates that the SCC0 license is followed. At the same time, SCC0 proposes to embed standard variables in the contract to declare the license version and the license management contract address, so that other smart contracts can automatically read these variables and determine the license information of the contract. This machine-readable license declaration is not available in traditional licenses. Traditional open source licenses do not have standardized code-level tags, and contracts cannot directly identify each other's legal status. SCC0 makes the license metadata on-chain open and transparent.
(5) Innovation in decentralized censorship
SCC0 adopts a whitelist management system, not a blacklist management system. In the SCC0 licensed ecosystem, each contract must call the license management smart contract to check whether the other party is on the whitelist before interacting with other SCC0 licensed applications. All SCC0 dApps need to register with the license management contract when deployed and be approved by the DAO review mechanism before they can officially enter the ecosystem.
In blacklist mode, the system allows everyone to use it by default, and only punishes after violations are found. This method is suitable for the legal governance system of the Web2 era, but in the Web3 ecosystem, it means that malicious contracts may cause harm before the blacklist takes effect. The whitelist mechanism adopted by SCC0 requires that all SCC0-licensed contracts must first undergo compliance review and enter the whitelist before they are allowed to interact. This method ensures the purity of the ecosystem and prevents violations from occurring.
2. A future beyond imagination
In the book "A Realist's Utopia" by the famous Dutch writer Rutger Bregman, there is a recommendation: "The worst thing is not that the future will not get better, but that we can't imagine a better future." This sentence reveals a real dilemma: when society is constrained by the existing economic structure and technological framework, we often find it difficult to break away from the existing model and conceive a truly subversive future.
But history tells us that real change often comes from ideas that seem surreal at first. This is exactly the case with SCC0’s vision—it is not groundless, nor is it just a fantasy of technological optimism, but a realistic deduction based on the development trend of automation and blockchain decentralized technology. Within this framework, we might as well further open up the boundaries of imagination to conceive a more vivid and extreme future—a new era in which technology and social structure are completely reshaped.
1. From private property rights to decentralized public resources
A post-scarcity society refers to an economic scenario in which most goods can be mass-produced at very low cost and provided to everyone almost free of charge. This means that basic human needs (and even most desires) are easily met, free from the resource scarcity constraints of the traditional economy[27]. The capitalist economy of the industrial era was driven by private property rights, and companies obtained excess profits by monopolizing key resources. However, in the future society, a large amount of wealth may be created by automated systems, which raises a key question: when machines replace human labor as the main productive force, who should own the ownership? If we still follow the traditional model and allow a small number of capital owners to monopolize these "robot means of production", it will inevitably exacerbate the gap between the rich and the poor. Harvard economist Richard Freeman warned that as automation advances, "wealth will increasingly come from ownership of robots rather than labor"[28], and society may be divided into a small number of rich people who own robots and the majority of workers who are replaced by machines. In the worst case scenario, the high concentration of capital leads to "feudalism in the robot age", with a small number of robot owners becoming the new "feudal lords" and the majority of people becoming vassals and unable to share the prosperity brought by automation.
To avoid this future, the distribution of ownership of the means of production must be redesigned - broader public participation and common ownership will be the key options. The SCC0 license is designed to support an open and shared "Smart Commons" ecosystem. SCC0 requires that all smart commons must be open source and provided to the public free of charge (only the on-chain gas fee needs to be paid). This coincides with the post-scarcity ideal: knowledge and software, as non-exclusive commodities, can be infinitely copied without additional cost, so open source licenses can make software available to the whole society with almost "zero scarcity". When digital resources such as code and AI algorithms enter the public domain under SCC0, everyone can use and improve them freely, which lays the foundation for a future of "abundant technology delivery".
2. Synergy between decentralization and open source
From the perspective of social structure, the future society supported by SCC0 will tend to be a decentralized collaborative community. In such a society, a large amount of means of production (such as software, AI, and data) are jointly owned by the public and managed through blockchain and smart contracts, rather than owned by monopolistic enterprises. Future production will approach zero marginal cost due to the widespread application of AI and robots, and traditional capital will rely less on labor, which will create conditions for the rise of the "collaborative consensus economy." As automation deepens, the embryonic form of post-capitalism may emerge.
Scholar Jeremy Rifkin predicts that by 2050, "a collaborative and shared public sphere will likely become the primary arbiter of global economic life," and capitalism will give way to a new paradigm of win-win cooperation.[29] This means that many products and services will be almost free, and wealth will no longer be accumulated through monopoly property rights, but will be managed and shared by online collaborative communities. Open source code and public goods play an infrastructure role in the future economy: they are like the "highways" and "bridges" of the digital age, providing a foundation for innovation and collaboration for all.
The full open source and public ownership promoted by SCC0 is the prototype of this new model. Developers give up the ownership of the code and rely on rewards from public funds to obtain income. This is similar to an economic form of "distribution by value contribution" rather than "distribution by property rights", which can be regarded as the embodiment of public ownership economy in the digital field.
3. Automated governance and human liberation
In a highly automated post-scarcity society, AI will play a key role in governance. Decentralized autonomous organizations can have rules enforced by smart contracts, while AI can be used for automated decision support and resource allocation optimization. For example, AI can analyze on-chain data in real time, provide objective evidence for community proposals, or automatically trigger certain governance actions according to established policies, such as detecting misconduct and enforcing penalties. The SCC0 ecosystem specifically includes the concept of dAIpp, which is an application developed or managed by one or more AIs. For such autonomous AI agents, they control assets and permissions through private keys like human accounts, and as long as the algorithm is reliable, AI can safely participate in governance. This means that in the future, there may even be situations where AI owns and manages public resources, and governance decisions are automatically executed by AI according to smart contract regulations, thereby reducing human subjective bias.
4. Decentralized incentive mechanism for open source society
In an open source society, when all achievements are open and shared, innovation will emerge exponentially. Developers can use the code and AI models of existing SCC0 projects for secondary creation without any barriers, without worrying about licensing disputes, greatly reducing the cost of innovation. SCC0 further introduces this model into the field of on-chain collaboration, supplemented by incentive mechanisms, which may inspire collaborative innovation on a larger scale. In the future, a modular public application ecosystem may emerge - different teams optimize a certain module and assemble complex applications through standard interfaces. This is similar to the componentized collaboration of the UNIX philosophy, but it is driven by economic incentives on the blockchain, making voluntary collaboration more sustainable.
In addition, the SCC0 license explicitly combines the public fund pool under the Proof-of-Value consensus, the "Satoshi UTO Fund". After developers contribute their projects to the public domain, they have the opportunity to automatically receive rewards from the fund to compensate for their investment. This heralds a new type of economy, that is, a business model that is not based on direct charges, but is dominated by public incentives. This is similar to the use of basic income in the field of innovation - contributors receive income for creating public value, rather than charging for exclusive intellectual property rights. In the future, under the SCC0 framework, similar public funds will be automatically managed by on-chain consensus to implement the distribution principle of Proof-of-Value. This is expected to solve the "tragedy of the commons" problem that has long plagued the public domain and stimulate a steady stream of public innovation.
3. Future Challenges
As the world's first smart contract-driven public domain license, SCC0 has made breakthrough innovations in promoting the decentralization of public resources, eliminating intellectual property monopolies, and building an AI autonomous economy. However, as it is still in its early stages, SCC0 still faces challenges in technology, economy, governance, and other aspects, and needs further optimization and improvement.
1. Ecosystem acceptance
Technological change is not just a change in code and protocol, but also a change in the way people think. The concept of SCC0 license is very advanced, but real-world developers, companies, and governments are not necessarily ready to accept such a completely decentralized licensing system. Traditional enterprise software development still relies on the intellectual property profit model, and even in the open source community, there is still a need for commercialization. Compared with MIT or Apache licenses, the economic model of SCC0 licenses has not yet been widely adopted. How to attract developers to the SCC0 ecosystem? How to gradually migrate mainstream Web3 projects to the SCC0 licensing system? This requires time, education, and a number of successful SCC0 licensing projects to prove the feasibility of this model. SCC0 may need to set up a developer incentive program to attract early adopters and provide migration solutions for projects to lower the threshold for developers to adopt SCC0 licenses.
2. Adaptation of law to the real world
The SCC0 license emphasizes that code is law, and its rules are enforced by smart contracts rather than the traditional legal system. However, the laws of the real world have not fully adapted to the existence of decentralized licenses. Under the existing intellectual property system, most countries still use copyright law to protect software, while SCC0 directly requires software to enter the public domain, which may conflict with the current legal framework. Will companies or individuals face additional legal risks when using dApps or AI resources licensed under SCC0? Are the rules of the SCC0 license legally binding in real-world courts? Perhaps SCC0 needs to learn from the experience of open source organizations such as the Linux Foundation and Mozilla to promote the advancement of national laws, thereby achieving the legal adaptability of the SCC0 license and enabling it to be formally recognized in more countries.
3. Limitations of AI development speed on SCC0
The future vision of SCC0 is deeply dependent on AI automation, especially in decentralized governance, contribution value assessment, smart contract execution, and the operation of AI autonomous economies. However, current AI technology has not yet developed to the point where it can fully support the operation of the SCC0 ecosystem, which has become an important bottleneck for the actual implementation of SCC0.
V. Conclusion
The history of public domain licenses is a journey of exploration about freedom and sharing. Although its influence in the software industry has declined, it is ushering in new development opportunities in the Web3 era. Blockchain and smart contracts provide technical support for public domain licenses, allowing decentralized licensing systems to break free from the constraints of traditional laws and achieve true openness and sharing through self-executing rules of code.
As a new public domain licensing model in the Web3 era, the SCC0 license not only provides a decentralized software governance method, but also ensures that developers' contributions are fairly incentivized through a value proof mechanism. It solves the shortcomings of traditional public domain licenses in terms of incentive mechanisms, legal applicability, and governance, making the sustainable development of public goods possible. More importantly, SCC0 is not just a licensing agreement, it is also a new social collaboration model that promotes the sharing of public resources worldwide and builds a decentralized smart public appliance ecosystem.
In the future, with the development of AI and blockchain, SCC0 may become a new standard for public domain licenses, providing a more sustainable infrastructure for global open source collaboration. The value of public domain licenses is not only reflected in the past free software movement, but will also promote comprehensive changes in knowledge, technology, and social structure in the Web3 era. This "dusty pearl" is being polished and will shine with new light in the decentralized future.
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