License¶
- Open Processing Model is free software, copyright © 2026 e-editiones, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later), with additional permissions granted under section 7 of that licence.
- Members of e-editiones may use the same software under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 or later (LGPL-3.0-or-later).
- Configurations and templates generated by
opm initare under a CC0 1.0 Universal license. - Base and example ODDs retain their licenses (CC BY 4.0).
The AGPL is the strongest of the common copyleft licences: it reaches not only software
you distribute, but software you operate — a web service built on opm owes its source
to the people using it. That is deliberate. If you want to keep your own software closed, or run a service
without publishing its source, become a member. As a non-profit organization, e-editiones mainly
relies on membership fees to keep maintaining the software and would like to give something
back to those institutions and individuals supporting it.
What this means for your edition¶
If I use opm, does my own work come under the
AGPL too — the licence that obliges you to hand your source over to the people who use your
software? For the ordinary way of working — you run opm, it turns your TEI into a
website, a book or a Word file — the answer is no, and there is nothing you need to do.
Almost every line below therefore says nothing to do. Only two things are ever asked of
you: credit the ready-made ODDs if you build on them, and — should you go past using opm
and build its code into a program of your own — release that program under the AGPL as
well, unless you are a member of e-editiones and take the LGPL instead.
| What you are doing | What it means for you |
|---|---|
Running opm to produce your edition, on your own machine or a server |
Nothing to do. Using a program is not the same as passing it on. |
Publishing the HTML, Word, PDF or Markdown that opm produced |
Nothing to do. The result is your edition. The AGPL licence does not reach it and e-editiones claims nothing in it. |
| Your TEI files, the ODD you wrote, your templates and stylesheets | Nothing to do. They are your work and stay entirely yours. |
The transform that opm builds from your ODD, and running it |
Nothing to do. It is your ODD expressed as code. Pass it on and use it under any terms you like. |
Using the templates, stylesheets and settings that opm init put in your project folder |
Nothing to do. They are dedicated to the public domain under a CC0 1.0 Universal license: change them, publish them, license them as you see fit. |
| Using one of the ready-made ODDs — TEI Publisher, DocBook, JATS — or a transform built from one | Give credit. They come from TEI Publisher under CC BY 4.0, copyright e-editiones and its contributors, built on TEI Consortium material (CC BY 3.0 / BSD-2-Clause). Name them where you describe how the edition was made; opm also repeats the statement at the top of every transform it compiles, so the credit travels with the file. Nothing further is asked, and your own files stay under whatever licence you choose. |
Using the documents under examples/*/data/, the texts that come with the example projects |
Check that example's README. They are scholarly sources with their own provenance and rights, and not e-editiones' to give away. |
Writing a script or program that runs the opm command, the way you would run any other command-line tool |
Nothing to do. Your program stays yours, closed if you want it closed. |
Writing small Python add-ons that opm loads to extend what it can look up in your documents |
Nothing to do. They count as your work, even though opm loads them while it runs. |
Building opm's code into a program of your own, then giving that program to others or putting it on the web |
The AGPL applies to your program too. You release it under that same licence, and anyone you give it to — or anyone who uses it over the web — may ask you for its source. |
Copying opm's own source code into your project |
Same as above. |
Building opm into software of your own, or hosting it as a service, and not wanting to release that under the AGPL |
Not without a licence. Run opm as a command instead, or ask us: info@e-editiones.org. |
| Any of the above, if you are a member of e-editiones | The LGPL applies instead, if you want it. Your own software may stay closed and a service you host owes its users nothing, though changes you make to opm itself are still shared. See Member licence. |
Member licence¶
Members of e-editiones in good standing may use opm under the GNU Lesser General
Public License, version 3 or later as an alternative to the AGPL. The grant is automatic
on becoming a member and covers every release published during the membership; for those
releases it is perpetual and survives the membership ending. In practice it lifts the two
obligations that weigh heaviest:
- your application built on
opmmay remain proprietary, and - a hosted service built on
opmowes its users nothing under §13.
The LGPL's own conditions still apply: modifications to opm
itself should be made available under the LGPL, copyright and licence
notices should be preserved, and your recipients must be able to substitute their own build of
opm.
Full terms are in
LICENSING.md, Part B.
Two things need a separate agreement: removing or altering copyright and licence notices,
and conveying opm on terms that do not satisfy the LGPL. Write to
info@e-editiones.org.
Contributing¶
Contributions are released under the AGPL and require a one-click contributor license agreement, adapted from the Harmony Agreements (Harmony CLA 1.0, section 2.3 Option Five — outbound licensing under any licence, coupled with Harmony's standing condition that we keep publishing your contribution under the licence in force on the day you submitted it, which is the AGPL). You keep your copyright; e-editiones gets the right to relicense, which is what makes the member grant, the additional permissions and the commercial licences possible, and is bound in return to keep publishing your work under the AGPL. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Dependencies¶
All runtime dependencies are permissively licensed and impose no copyleft of their own: lxml and Babel (BSD-3-Clause), Jinja2 (BSD), elementpath, Typer, Rich, python-docx and platformdirs (MIT).
This page explains e-editiones' intent in plain language and is not legal advice. Where it and the licence documents (LICENSE, LICENSING.md) disagree, the licence documents govern.