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This is the OpenMRS, Ltd ("OpenMRS") OpenMRS License FAQ. It aims to answer the most common questions people have about using and distributing code under Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0) + Health-Related Additional Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability.
If you see any errors in this FAQ, or have suggestions for further questions, please contact OpenMRS at openmrs@openmrs.org. Note that these answers do not represent our license. The explanations are not legal advice. If you need to know exactly what the OpenMRS license requires, you need to read and understand the license itself; if you need legal advice, you need to talk to a lawyer.
Why did OpenMRS choose Mozilla Public License (MPL) 2.0 + Health-Related Additional Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability?
There are several factors that initially attracted us to an MPL-based license originally:
- Our goal to keep the platform open without scaring off entrepreneurs or others who might have interest in leveraging the platform for their commercial interests. Part of our mission is to empower people in resource-constrained environments to help build efficient and sustainable solutions to meet the health care needs of their people, which is – in large part – best accomplished through local capacity-building and allowing for the growth of self-sustaining solution such as service-based companies.
- Indemnity for medico-legal issues.
- Allow modules to be licensed separately. While we love to see people making open-source modules for OpenMRS, we don't want to prevent people from creating commercial modules if it can help them creating sustainable solutions and improve the care for people in resource-constrained environments.
- Ensure that work on the platform itself is shared.
But we had to make several modifications to MPL 1.1 to meet our needs, meaning we weren't using an official OSI-approved license. When MPL 2.0 came it, it presented a great opportunity to migrate to a largely identical license that met our needs and no longer required us to make modifications to the license.
Why is there a disclaimer?
The Health-Related Additional Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability is a tool afforded by MPL 2.0 that allows us to address our specific medico-legal needs without having to modify the license itself.
I want to distribute complete and unchanged binary packages of the Original Code provided by OpenMRS. What do I have to do?
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- add a conspicuous notice stating where to find the exact source to the binary you are distributing (Section 3.2)
- if your documentation has a section dealing with licensing or the recipient's rights to the code, put a copy of the MPL 2.0 + Disclaimer in Health-Related Additional Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability in it. (Section 3.5)
You may distribute any binaries you create under a license of your choosing, as long as it doesn't interfere with the recipients' right to the source under the MPL 2.0 (Section 3.2).
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How are OpenMRS Modules affected by the OpenMRS License?
MPL 2.0 + Disclaimer covers Health-Related Additional Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability covers the core OpenMRS code and is used for all of the OpenMRS community-supported and distributed modules, but other modules are not required to be licensed under MPL 2.0. In fact, modules do not have to be open source. You are free to create a closed-source module and distribute it under any license you wish. Module authors who are uncertain of how to license their module are encouraged to make their modules open source and, unless they have some reason to use a different license, use the same licensing as OpenMRS, but this is not a requirement for modules.
Who has the right to publish new versions of MPL 2.0 (Section 10.1)?
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Can I build a company around OpenMRS software?
Sure. The most fundamental goal of the OpenMRS Community is to improve the health of people in resource-constrained environment by providing a common platform upon which people can meet their local needs. One of the only ways that truly sustainable solutions can be created is for local solutions to be self-sustaining. If you become proficient in installing, customizing, and/or maintaining OpenMRS implementations, you could, for example, build a company to provide local service to those implementations around you. The little bits of work you do in improving the platform along the way can be combined with many others around the world to benefit everyone, including meeting your own needs.