It would seem that—through a process of deliberate legal framing and creative codification—Crow has independently rediscovered and formalized an idea that has long existed only in fragments, half-remembered and rarely defended in the modern era. This was not an act of imitation, nor a conscious revival of any single historical model, but rather the convergence of long-standing mythic instincts with a contemporary understanding of how ownership, authorship, and enclosure operate in late-stage creative economies. What emerged was not a permissive license in the conventional sense, but a declaration of category: a refusal to treat a fictional corpus as intellectual property at all, and a decision instead to reclassify it as mythology while the creator still lived, published, and retained full awareness of what that choice entailed.
What Crow has done is closest to a myth commons—distinct from open-source software, and equally distinct from Creative Commons licensing. Open-source software, for all its virtues, remains utilitarian and functional at its core. It presumes an optimization problem, a technical goal, and a culture of contribution governed by versioning, maintainership, and compatibility. Creative Commons, meanwhile, remains rooted in copyright logic even as it relaxes it; it presumes an owner who grants permissions, an author whose name must often persist as an organizing axis, and a legal framework designed to manage reuse rather than dissolve authority. The myth commons operates on a different axis entirely. It does not ask how a work may be reused; it asks whether the work should be ownable in the first place.
Historically, mythology functioned precisely because no one was in a position to defend it. Myths survived by being retold incorrectly, localized irresponsibly, commercialized shamelessly, and contradicted constantly. The strength of a myth was never its internal consistency but its resilience under distortion. What is unusual in the modern moment is not that someone would want their work to function this way, but that someone would choose to formalize that outcome in advance, rather than allowing it to happen through neglect, obscurity, or posthumous loss of control. OML-97 does not abandon authorship accidentally; it relinquishes authority intentionally.
This is the critical distinction. Most contemporary “shared universe” efforts fail not because they are too open, but because they are not open enough. They retain soft canons, stewardship committees, tone enforcement, attribution policing, or commercial choke points that reassert hierarchy even while gesturing toward collaboration. The result is not myth, but bureaucracy wearing myth’s skin. By contrast, the OML-97 framework removes nearly all of the mechanisms by which a creator might later intervene. It permits contradiction. It permits misuse. It permits profit without tribute. And most importantly, it forbids enclosure—not through moral appeal, but through structural denial. No derivative may close what was opened, because doing so would reintroduce the very category the license rejects.
From an observational standpoint, this places Crow in a role far older than modern authorship but largely incompatible with modern creative markets: that of the first teller rather than the proprietor. The first teller does not vanish; their version remains available, often foundational, sometimes dominant. But it is no longer definitive. Authority migrates outward into use, repetition, and mutation. Over time, the myth’s center of gravity shifts away from origin and toward utility—toward what survives being useful to other minds, other tables, other eras. This is not an abdication of craft. It is a wager on endurance.
There is also a subtle but important inversion at work. In most licensing schemes, the creator asks, implicitly or explicitly, to be remembered. Attribution clauses, brand continuity, canonical primacy—these are all attempts to secure legacy through control. The myth commons secures legacy through dispossession. It assumes that what is worth keeping will be kept without being ordered to remain intact. In this sense, OML-97 is less a license than a test: if the myth cannot survive freedom, it did not deserve permanence.
From within the Vaultus perspective, this move reads less as radical generosity and more as structural realism. Empires fall. Archives fracture. Names blur. What remains are frameworks that can be repurposed under new pressures. By declaring the mythos indestructible through openness, Crow sidesteps the usual failure modes of fictional worlds: corporate capture, legal stagnation, or cultural irrelevance. The work is no longer protected by law; it is protected by dispersal. It cannot be deleted because it cannot be recalled. It cannot be monopolized because it has no center.
In that sense, the rediscovery is not romantic but pragmatic. Myth is the only narrative technology that has demonstrably survived thousands of years without maintenance. OML-97 is simply an attempt to remember that fact early, and to act accordingly.