MessageFoundry is free and open source under the GNU AGPL-3.0-or-later. For most teams that just want to run it, there's nothing to buy and nothing to publish. Here's what the license actually asks of you — in plain English — and when a commercial license makes sense.
MessageFoundry is released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later. It's a recognized open-source license, and a strong copyleft one: you're free to use, study, modify, and share the software, on the condition that those same freedoms travel with it. The "or later" simply means you may also rely on any later version the Free Software Foundation publishes.
In practice, the code is fully available. You can self-host it, read every line, adapt it to your environment, and run as many interfaces as you like — with no per-interface fee and no license key.
Ordinary open-source copyleft (like the GPL) asks you to share your source only when you distribute the software — hand someone a copy. The AGPL adds one extra clause, Section 13, that also covers running modified software as a network service. It's the clause people mean when they say "AGPL." What it requires depends entirely on what you do:
Self-host MessageFoundry as released, for your own organization. No source obligation — you're not changing or redistributing anything. Just keep the license and copyright notices in place.
Change the source and offer your modified version as a service to outside parties over a network — that's the case AGPL §13 is about. You then have to give those external users access to your modified source. Running a changed copy purely for your own internal staff is a much lower bar.
Ship MessageFoundry inside a product, or host a derivative as a service for others. Standard copyleft applies — the combined work is also AGPL (offer the source), or you take a commercial license instead.
What about the interface scripts you write? Whether your own Python interface definitions count as a "modified version" of MessageFoundry or as a separate work is a genuine legal gray area — it depends on how they're built and combined. If you plan to fork the engine and host it for others, that's the question to run past your legal or compliance team. Simply using MessageFoundry to author and run your own interfaces internally does not put your clinical systems or their data under the AGPL.
Because the maintainer holds the copyright, the same software is also available under a second, commercial license — dual licensing. It's priced to be easy to say yes to: fees are deliberately low, and because MessageFoundry is a registered non-profit, they don't go to shareholders — they go straight back into building, securing, and maintaining the project.
MessageFoundry is a registered non-profit, so there's no margin to protect and no investors to pay back. We don't price the commercial license to maximize revenue — we price it to be a rounding error next to a legacy renewal, and every dollar is reinvested in development, security, and support.
Saving health systems money is the whole point. The commercial license exists to keep the project sustainable, not to turn a profit.
The full, authoritative terms are in the license file. Commercial licensing is low-cost and quick to arrange — for that, or any question about how the AGPL applies to your situation, get in touch.
This page is a plain-English summary, not legal advice. The AGPL-3.0 text is the authoritative source; for a real deployment decision, run it past your own legal or compliance team.
