Licence

Free to implement. Not free to resell.

OpenClinicalHistory is licensed under PolyForm Internal Use 1.0.0. Any organisation — public or private, for-profit or not — may deploy it, modify it and run it on its own patients' records at no cost. Offering it to third parties as a product or a service requires a separate agreement with me.

The short version

The line is who the software is offered to, not whether money changes hands.

A private hospital group running this on its own infrastructure is internal use, and costs nothing — commercial status is irrelevant. A vendor packaging it and selling it to health organisations is not, and needs to talk to me first. That single distinction is the whole licence.

Permitted, free, no agreement needed

  • Deploying it inside your own infrastructure
  • Running it against your own organisation's records
  • Modifying, extending and adapting the code
  • Use by a for-profit health organisation
  • Use across your affiliates and subsidiaries
  • Contractors and integrators working on your behalf
  • Mirroring it into your internal artefact repository
  • Keeping and using your own modifications

Requires a separate agreement

  • Selling it, or licensing it onward
  • Bundling it into a product you supply to others
  • Hosting it as a managed service for third parties
  • Offering its functionality to organisations other than your own
  • Publishing or redistributing the source
  • Using the OpenClinicalHistory name for a fork

The specifics

The questions your legal team will ask.

These are the points that decide whether a health organisation can actually proceed, so they are stated here rather than left to interpretation.

Licence
PolyForm Internal Use 1.0.0, unmodified. Two pages of plain English, drafted by lawyers, and published at polyformproject.org. A LICENSE file ships with the code.
Cost
Nothing, now or later. There is no paid tier, no seat count, no support contract and no upgrade path that starts charging you.
Duration
Perpetual and irrevocable for the version you receive. I may stop issuing new versions; I cannot switch off what you have already deployed. You are not exposed to me changing my mind.
Repository access
The code lives in a private repository and access is by invitation. Access is a courtesy and can be withdrawn; your licence to the code you already have cannot. Losing the invitation does not affect anything you have deployed.
Contributions
If you send a change back, you keep your copyright and licence it to the project so it can be distributed to other implementers. The mechanism ships with the repo. You are never obliged to contribute anything.
Contractors
Your systems integrator, consultancy or contract developers may deploy, configure and modify it on your behalf, and may charge you for that work. They are selling their labour, not my code. The licence sits with your organisation, not with them.
Affiliates
Your organisation includes its affiliates and subsidiaries. Large health groups are dozens of legal entities and a group-wide deployment should not be a licensing problem.
Your changes
Yours. You own the modifications you make and you are under no obligation to publish them or send them back to me — though I would very much like to hear what you changed.
SNOMED CT
Not covered, and not mine to grant. The framework ships no terminology content. You import your own SNOMED CT release under your own national affiliate licence — free at the point of use in member countries including Australia, the UK and the US.
Warranty
None. No warranty, no indemnity, no fitness for any clinical purpose, expressed or implied. It is your organisation that validates, governs and takes responsibility for any deployment.
Name
The OpenClinicalHistory name and mark are reserved. Run it, modify it, build on it — just don't ship a fork under this name.
If I stop
One person's evenings is a real risk and you are entitled to price it. My intention is that if the project is unmaintained for a sustained period, the grant broadens to a permissive open-source licence so implementers are not stranded. The precise trigger is still being drafted; ask me and I will tell you exactly where it has landed.

Why this licence

Two failure modes, avoided.

Noncommercial licences exclude the wrong people

Much of the health sector is commercial. Private hospital groups, day-surgery operators, insurers and GP networks are for-profit companies, and a licence with “noncommercial” in it would shut out a large share of the organisations this was built for. Whether the licensee makes money is not the concern. Whether my code is being sold on is.

Permissive licences invite the one outcome I want to prevent

Under a fully permissive licence a vendor can take the pipeline, stand it up, and sell it as a six-figure product while the organisations it was built for still pay. Internal Use keeps the door open for everyone implementing it and closed to anyone reselling it — and a vendor that wants to build a business on it can simply ask.

Naming

Source-available, not open source.

Recipients get the complete source. That is not the same as open source, and the difference is worth stating plainly.

“Open source” has a specific meaning: a licence approved by the Open Source Initiative, which requires permitting commercial redistribution. PolyForm Internal Use deliberately does not permit that, so it is not OSI-approved and this is not an open-source project. The repository is private, and access is by invitation.

“Open” in the name refers to what the framework does — open standards in, standards-based coded clinical data out, running inside your own boundary, with no proprietary lock on your data or your terminology.

Naming it accurately matters more to me than the label. An implementer who discovers the distinction after committing is an implementer I have wasted.

Commercial use

If you want to build a business on it, ask.

This is not a closed door. If you are a vendor wanting to bundle it, or you want to run it as a managed service for health organisations, there is a conversation to be had and I would rather have it than find out afterwards. Tell me what you want to build and who it would serve.

Ask about a commercial licence Become a founding implementer

This page is a plain-English summary written to help you decide whether to proceed. It is not legal advice, and I am not a lawyer. Where this page and the LICENSE file shipped with the code differ, the LICENSE file governs.