openstart-legal is a set of open source legal documents used for various business purposes, with a focus on technology startups. It is always a work in progress, and aims to become a good template for entrepreneurs and businesses to copy and then tailor to their specific purposes.
The basis for openstart-legal is a set of documents compiled over the years by David A. Johnston, a serial entrepreneur who realized that the money he spends anyway on legal fees in order to create legal these documents might as well serve the extra benefit of helping the startup community at large. He has been sharing these documents ad-hock for a while.
We at Bitblu strongly identify with the principles of Pay It Forward and transparency, and wish to lead an collaborative, open initiative to share these documents. This is why we decided that all our legal documents will not just be open, but also in a format that is easy to review and edit on a community coding platform such as github. Markdown is the obvious choice, and will allow other individuals and companies to contribute back to openstart-legal in the form of pull requests.
- v1 - The original agreements developed by David are included verbatim in this repository, for ease of use (David's original documents are available on Google Drive).
- v2 - We will develop a new set of Markdown-formatted documents as we go along. These documents will be easier to edit and diff via github. You should be aware that in opposed to the v1 documents, the v2 documents will be "younger" and with less legal mileage, at least at first, compared to David's mature battle-tested documents.
The obvious disclaimer is that any and all documents found in openstart-legal or elsewhere are templates only, and you should also do your own thinking on what you want your own documents to contain, and have them reviewed by your own lawyers.
The v2 documents all contain a "template assignment header", with "variables", some of which will have default values (e.g. number of shares that a founder gets, vesting schedule etc.), and some of them left blank (e.g. names of founders). It is meant to be filled in when applying the template for a particular instance.
All openstart-legal documents use the Unlicense license - which basically specifies you can do whatever you want with them.