Open Source Guy

About Shuji Sado

Kanji Name: 佐渡 秀治

I’d been involved with Linux since 1994 when I was still a college student, and it was in 1998 in Kyoto that I hosted Linux Conference which is known for one of the Open Source events at the earliest stage in Japan. Then in 1999, I strove to found Japan Linux Association. After the foundation, I stayed there for two years as the director. In 2000, I founded Open Source Group Japan, and ever since, I’ve conducted Open Source trademark management and Open Source licenses translation. In the same year of 2000, when VA Linux Systems Japan was founded, I held two posts, Vice President of Marketing and Vice President of OSDN division till August 2007. In September 2007, I founded OSDN which is a spin-out company from VA Linux’s OSDN division, and assumed the position of CEO. OSDN K.K. is known for operating two websites called SRAD (formerly known as Slashdot Japan) and OSDN (formerly known as SourceForge.JP). I am also involved in these websites as an editor and admin.

My last education degree is master’s degree in Industrial Engineering at Graduate School of Engineering, Kanazawa Institute of Technology. After I received my degree, I worked at Kanazawa Keizai University (Presently known as Kanazawa Seiryo University) for three years.

こんにちは。

Shuji Sado

Open Source Guy

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JP Home: https://shujisado.com/

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Recent posts

Can You Relicense Open Source by Rewriting It with AI? The chardet 7.0 Dispute

Can AI be used to reimplement software with nearly the same functionality, and then even change its license as a result, in what might be described as a form of license washing? This issue has been discussed repeatedly for some time. Yet, setting aside discussions of reimplementation for research purposes, I do not believe there…

Tracing Creative Commons Licenses Across AI: Training Data, Models, Outputs

Copyright issues in AI model training and generated outputs are widely discussed, but less attention is paid to how copyright licenses, the actual mechanism for granting permission, shape these workflows. Unlike traditional software, which is often described as a one-to-one relationship between source code and executable code, AI involves three interlocking layers: input data, the…

The Hidden Risks of NVIDIA’s Open Model License

Recently, regarding the open-weights AI model “Nemotron 3” released by NVIDIA, there are scattered media reports mistakenly describing it as open source. Because there is concern that these reports encourage ignoring the usage risks of the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement (version dated October 24, 2025; hereinafter referred to as the NVIDIA License), which is…

The Current State of the Theory that GPL Propagates to AI Models Trained on GPL Code

When GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021, the fact that its training data included a vast amount of Open Source code publicly available on GitHub attracted significant attention, sparking lively debates regarding licensing. While there were issues concerning conditions such as attribution required by most licenses, there was a particularly high volume of discourse suggesting…

The Legal Hack: Why U.S. Law Sees Open Source as “Permission,” Not a Contract

In Japan, the common view is to treat an Open Source license as a license agreement, or a contract. This is also the case in the EU. However, in the United States—the origin point for almost every aspect of Open Source—an Open Source license has long been considered not a contract, but a “unilateral permission”…

Evaluating OpenMDW: A Revolution for Open AI, or a License to Openwash?

Although the number of AI models distributed under Open Source licenses is increasing, it can be said that AI systems in which all related components, including training data, are open are still in a developmental stage, even as a few promising systems have emerged. In this context, this past May, the Linux Foundation, in collaboration…

A Curious Phenomenon with Gemma Model Outputs and License Propagation

While examining the licensing details of Google’s Gemma model, I noticed a potentially puzzling phenomenon: you can freely assign a license to the model’s outputs, yet depending on how those outputs are used, the original Terms of Use might suddenly propagate to the resulting work. Outputs vs. Model Derivatives The Gemma Terms of Use distinguish…

Should ‘Open Source AI’ Mean Exposing All Training Data?

DeepSeek has had a major global impact. This appears to stem not only from the emergence of a new force in China that threatens the dominance of major U.S. AI vendors, but also from the fact that the AI model itself is being distributed under the MIT License, which is an Open Source license. Nevertheless,…