Our open source licensing model

We believe in true and 100% open source. It means all of our code is available under the open source license AGPLv3, and yes, free is really free. You can find our code on GitHub. There are a few conditions which we gladly explain in plain language.

Using and modifying

You are free to use, modify, combine, compile our software code in any way you want, without any obligation, as long as you don’t redistribute it by means of hardware distribution or through web services. You are not allowed to modify the license or sub-license code.

Sharing or distributing code

If you are combining our software code with additional software, which interacts closely with OpenRemote, you must give users access to the source code of the additional software, under the same AGPLv3 license, in such a way that it’s reasonably easy to compile into a working code. ‘Interacts closely’, doesn’t include simply running executables alongside OpenRemote, and interacting with OpenRemote, eg. via APIs or our web components. So free is still really free.

So how does the company behind OpenRemote make money?

Thanks to the platform being ‘open source’, organisations (eg. Manufacturers, System integrators or Governments) can easily and freely adopt OpenRemote. When they are enthusiastic about using our software to build and use a successful IoT implementation we are confident that some of those organisations appreciate support from our end. This can be developers support, project management, third line support, or hosting. The company OpenRemote offers that support as a paid for service. Secondly, if an organisation prefers not to give access to any additional interacting software, for example code they added to OpenRemote that they don’t want to share as open source with others, the company OpenRemote offers commercial licenses which exempts them from that obligation.