The Beer for the Worker (BWL) licenses are a family of shared-source licenses designed to align freedom of use with the material well-being of the people whose labor makes creative and technical work possible.

They begin from two simple ideas:

• "Free as in beer," but beer is for the worker.
• "Free as in speech," but corporations are not individuals, and their speech is not inherently granted the same rights as human expression.

Taken together, these ideas reflect a belief that the freedoms traditionally associated with open culture and open software should primarily serve human beings and the communities they form, rather than being automatically available for extraction by large, capital-driven entities.

Intended for software, source code, and related technical artifacts.

Grants broad rights to individuals, workers, and worker-owned organizations — including for commercial purposes — provided that such use materially benefits workers and does not undermine their dignity or livelihoods. Default corporate use is restricted.

Intended for non-software creative and intellectual works, including text, art, media, datasets, research, and documentation.

Follows the same principles as BWL, adapted for creative and expressive works. Includes attribution requirements, share-alike provisions, and explicit protections against extraction by platforms and publishers.

The BWL AI Extensions are optional addenda that may be applied to either BWL or BWL-C to define how AI and machine learning may participate in, be trained on, or be used alongside the licensed Work.

Without these extensions, BWL licenses are AI-agnostic — AI is treated as a tool, and its use falls within the general license terms without specific callouts. The AI Extensions exist because there are known ways AI can be used that do not benefit workers or the greater good, and these extensions allow licensors to clearly express their boundaries.

Extensions are selected by tier and appended to the license identifier:

Example labels:

• BWL | AI-C2S | AI-T0 | AI-S0 — Software; AI limited to logic/ML tooling; no training on the code; local control only
• BWL-C | AI-C2M | AI-T0 — Creative work; AI permitted for concept and process tools only; no AI training

We acknowledge, openly and without dismissal, that there are long-standing and principled objections within free and open-source communities to shared-source licenses and to licenses that impose commercial or organizational limitations.

The Beer for the Worker licenses are not offered as replacements for open-source or Creative Commons licenses, nor as critiques of those traditions. They are offered as an alternative, intended for creators and developers who share the values of openness and freedom but who also have concerns about how their work may be used by powerful institutions — particularly in ways that extract value, entrench inequality, or materially harm workers.

For some creators, unconditional openness is the correct and principled choice. For others, especially in an era of large-scale platform extraction, automation, and asymmetrical power, the question of who benefits from openness has become harder to ignore.

Whether or not you choose to use a Beer for the Worker license, we encourage readers, creators, and users to reflect on the broader implications of how creative and technical work is licensed, distributed, and monetized.

Licenses are not only legal tools; they are expressions of values. They quietly shape who is empowered, who profits, and who bears the costs.

Even if you ultimately decide that BWL is not right for your work, we hope this framework invites thoughtful consideration of how freedom, labor, and responsibility intersect — and how we might build systems that better serve the greater good.