License
This page describes the licensing direction for OiC.OS. It is not a legal agreement. Concrete terms for each component will be published when the engine is released as open source.
For what the platform is meant to build — banks, ERP systems, currency areas, and other organisational forms — see Platform.
Direction
The OiC.OS Engine is planned to be released as open source — with the long-term aim of placing the core engine in the public domain, so that the institutional and economic structures it encodes remain freely available as shared infrastructure.
Applications, organisations, and deployments built with the engine may remain closed and proprietary, at the discretion of their owners — analogous to the Linux kernel (open) and proprietary applications that run on top of it (closed).
Red Hat as a role model
We take Red Hat's community-and-enterprise model as inspiration for licensing and stewardship: an open core engine, commercial support and services, and an ecosystem where vendors and users can build proprietary value on shared foundations without giving up their own business logic or data models.
Polycentric governance
OiC.OS Engine itself may grow as a Red Hat-style open community — not governed by a single monolithic vendor alone, but by polycentric stewardship in which the engine's own governance structures (contracts, roles, compliance layers) help coordinate contributors, operators, and users. This concerns the project and engine, not the organisational forms users design on the platform.
That idea is not marketing copy alone: it rests on the same foundations as the engine — Ostrom's institutional layers as GovCat / DecCat / AccCat, hierarchical compositionality, and MES-style co-regulation. See Related research.
Planned terms (summary)
Work in progress — not yet legally binding:
| Layer | Target |
|---|---|
| OiC.OS Engine and OiC language | Open source (AGPL-3.0 planned for core components) |
| Organisations compiled and run on the engine | Proprietary (owner's choice) |
| Organisation Store / marketplace | Commercial terms (to be drafted) |
Concrete license terms for each component will be published with the open-source release of the engine. Until then, website content remains proprietary unless stated otherwise.
Current status
Until the open release, the engine, research materials, and this website remain proprietary. No use, copy, or distribution without permission.
Third-party components retain their original licenses.
Contact
- Licensing: contact@oicos.systems
- Partnerships: oicos.systems