OpenDesign is open source, and staying that way.

OpenDesign is free software. You can run it, read every line, change it, and share it. That is not a marketing promise. It is a license, and the license is designed so the freedom cannot be quietly taken away later.

The license in one line

OpenDesign is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later). In plain terms: you are free to use the software for any purpose, study how it works, modify it, and redistribute your copies (original or changed) as long as you pass those same freedoms along. The full, authoritative text lives in the LICENSE file on GitHub.

What copyleft means for you

The GPL is a copyleft license, which is a stronger commitment than "you can look at the code."

• You can fork and redistribute freely. Clone the repository, build on it, ship it to your team or the world.
• If you distribute a modified version, keep it open. When you hand a changed build to someone else, you also give them the corresponding source under the same GPL terms. The people who receive your version get the same rights you had.
• Nobody can close it and sell it back to you. Because every public copy carries the GPL forward, no company can take the community's OpenDesign, wrap it up, and re-release it as closed, proprietary software. The freedom is contagious by design.

Open core: the commercial edition

OpenDesign follows an open-core model, the same shape used by projects like ComfyUI and AltTab: the open application is the real product, and it stays free under the GPL, forever.

Alongside it, the project's steward (Miguel Angel Esparza Calero, operating as MAECLY) reserves the right to offer a separate commercial edition with additional features under a different, proprietary license. This is possible for one specific reason: MAECLY holds the copyright to the combined work, and every outside contribution comes in under a Contributor License Agreement (see below). Holding the rights is what makes it legal to offer the same code under more than one license.

The open edition is not a crippled demo or a time-limited trial. It is the product. The commercial edition, if and when it exists, adds on top. It never takes away from what is free.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and they are made under the GPL like the rest of the project. Two things are worth being explicit about:

• You keep your copyright. You do not sign your work away. You continue to own what you wrote.
• You sign a short CLA. The Contributor License Agreement grants MAECLY the right to relicense your contribution, including for the commercial edition. That is what keeps the open-core model workable.

We would rather say this plainly than bury it: within this project, only the steward can commercialize the combined work. If that trade-off is not for you, that is completely fair: the GPL fork is always yours to take.

The name

The code is free. The name is not part of that grant. "OpenDesign", the wordmark, and the logo are trademarks, and trademarks are deliberately excluded from the GPL so that "OpenDesign" keeps meaning one specific thing. You can build on the software all you like; using the marks is covered separately on the Brand & Trademark page.

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This is a plain-English summary, not legal advice; the LICENSE, CLA and TRADEMARK files in the repository are the authoritative terms.