Who maintains this license, why it exists, and where it is in the open-source-license ecosystem.
Researcher and maintainer of the Quantum General Public License. Works on post-quantum cryptography readiness, open Results in science, and the legal-technical layer between the two. Based in Lithuania; affiliated with Kaunas University of Technology (KTU).
The maintainer entity behind QGPL. The Initiative exists to articulate, publish, and defend a copyleft framework for Observation Outputs — the data, model outputs, and quantum/classical calculations that science and machine learning produce, which today fall through the cracks between source-code copyleft (GPL) and creative-works licensing (Creative Commons).
It is not a legal entity that owns rights on your behalf. It is a name under which the license is maintained, the canonical text is hosted, and the Compliance Toolkit specification is written.
Copyright © 2026 Dr. Šarūnas Grigaliūnas / The Open Reality Initiative.
All rights in this license document — meaning the text of QGPL v3.0 itself, including QGPL_v3.0_Quantum-Safe_LICENSE.txt, license.html, and the formatted renderings on this site — are reserved by the author and The Open Reality Initiative.
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
You may freely reproduce the canonical .txt in your own repositories, datasets, or papers as the LICENSE file for material you release under QGPL. You may not publish a modified version of the QGPL text under the same name; substantive modifications must be released as a different version or a separately-named license.
Those are governed by the license itself — see the full license text. They include copyleft reuse, modification, distribution, and patent grants, subject to the Quantum-Safe Distribution Metadata obligation in Section 5.
The HTML, CSS, and prose on qgpl.org (everything outside the canonical license text) are © 2026 Dr. Šarūnas Grigaliūnas / The Open Reality Initiative. Verbatim sharing for educational and editorial purposes is welcome; mirrors that misrepresent the license text or pretend authorship are not.
| Version | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| v3.0 — Quantum-Safe Edition | Current · canonical | Adds mandatory post-quantum release integrity (ML-DSA / SLH-DSA / XMSS / LMS) and PQ / hybrid key establishment for transport. Five-principle preamble. Canonical text |
| v2.0 — Universal Reference Frame | Superseded · withdrawn | Predecessor draft. Removed from this repository in favour of v3.0. The four-principle manifesto from v2.0 was evolved into the five-principle preamble of v3.0. |
Substantive changes to the license create a new versioned file (e.g., a future v3.1 or v4.0) rather than mutating the existing .txt. This is intentional — recipients of a QGPL Work need to know exactly which version of the terms they received.
QGPL-3.0 (proposed)QGPL is intended for use with the SPDX identifier QGPL-3.0. The toolkit's .qgpl.json manifest and the example NOTICE blocks already use this identifier in the license_spdx field.
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Proposed identifier | QGPL-3.0 |
| Listed on the official SPDX License List | Not yet submitted |
| Listed on OSI-approved licenses | Not yet submitted |
| FSF endorsement | Not yet sought |
| Roadmap | Submission to SPDX after v3.0 text stabilises and a reference toolkit implementation ships. See toolkit spec. |
Until QGPL-3.0 is on the SPDX License List, downstream tooling may flag it as a custom identifier. Use LicenseRef-QGPL-3.0 in SPDX expressions if your tool requires a registered prefix.
[security][adoption]The Initiative does not provide legal advice. For binding interpretation in a specific jurisdiction, consult counsel familiar with copyright and database rights in your country.
If you release a dataset, model, or paper supplement under QGPL, you do not need to cite the license itself in the body of your work — pointing recipients to qgpl.org and shipping the LICENSE file with the artifact is sufficient.
If you are writing about QGPL (e.g., a methods section, a survey, or a position paper), the suggested citation is:
Grigaliūnas, Š. (2026). Quantum General Public License (QGPL),
version 3.0 — Quantum-Safe Edition. The Open Reality Initiative.
https://qgpl.org/For the accompanying position paper:
Grigaliūnas, Š. (2026). Binding Post-Quantum Cryptography to Copyleft:
The Quantum General Public License v3.0. Position paper, The Open
Reality Initiative. https://qgpl.org/docs/paper/Read the full license text, copy the notice from Examples, and use the Compliance Toolkit to generate Section 5 metadata for your release.