Open Source AI Licensing

Will Chen, a former Latham & Watkins associate, has released MikeOSS, a free open-source legal AI platform designed to compete with proprietary tools like Harvey and Legora. The platform enables lawyers to draft, edit, review, and search documents through features including a projects vault, tabular review, and customizable workflows. Users supply their own Claude or Gemini API keys to run the system, which Chen has published on GitHub under an open-source license, allowing firms and developers to self-host and modify the software rather than rely on a vendor's closed infrastructure.

IBM and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell on May 28, a $5 billion initiative to deploy AI and over 20,000 engineers toward securing open source software supply chains. The program establishes a "trusted enterprise clearinghouse" designed to validate vulnerability fixes, coordinate disclosures, and distribute patches at scale across upstream open source projects and enterprise production environments. The companies will focus on vulnerability review, triage, patch development, dependency hardening, and release engineering.