Please find the document below outlining the new openEHR Licensing Changes Policy, created by the openEHR Foundation Board.
The Foundation Board is sharing this policy with the community for a 30-day consultation and review period, which will close on 14th February 2026 at 23:59 GMT.
During this time, we invite the community to review the document and provide any comments or feedback. Following the consultation period, the Foundation Board will review all feedback received:
If amendments are required, the consultation process will recommence.
If no further amendments are needed, the Foundation Board will submit the policy to the openEHR CiC Board for final approval.
Please add any comments directly to this thread. If you would prefer to provide feedback anonymously, you are welcome to email comms@openehr.org.
The document’s scope is unclear. The title is ‘Licensing changes policy’, which implies it refers to all assets that are described in Section 2. Sections 1-2 present this as a general licensing policy, but Section 3 narrows to “paused specifications only.” This should be clarified upfront or restructured entirely. The document should clarify its scope upfront: whether it (i) changes current licenses, (ii) establishes a general process for managing any future license changes across all assets, or (iii) is an additional policy that only applies to paused specifications.
Archetypes and specifications have fundamentally different licensing needs and risks. These need separate policies with different governance requirements. This is not made clear in this document, nor does it point to the existing licensing policy for each asset.
Governance concerns:
Section 4.2 describes a consultation process but provides no voting mechanism, appeal process, or clear decision criteria. Members can “lobby” but the Chair + CEO retain unilateral discretion.
Questions:
Which ‘Chair of the Board’ - Foundation Board or CIC Board?
How will member feedback be managed transparently if there is no voting process? What threshold of member objection would prevent a relicensing? How can that be measured if there is only lobbying or commenting in a Discourse discussion?
Who are the ‘management team’ referred to in para 2 of 4.2? Why mention specific roles if the policy should define the process, not the actors?
Recommendation:
This appears to be a specific policy for paused technical specifications only. Publishing it as a standalone document creates confusion about scope and relationship to existing licensing policies. Perhaps it should be published as an addendum to the existing licensing policy?
For “paused specs” I think we need to move them automatically to a less restrictive license so derived work (improvements, fixes, extensions, etc.) could be done by third parties, at least it’s fair for the author(s) to have the legal possibility of doing such work outside the SEC.
Then think about who can do such work (less restrictive license of spec to whom?), if it’s open to anyone, if it’s open only to companies or professionals associated with openEHR, etc.
Another point to consider is: what would happen if the SEC gets consensus to “unpause” a spec and get it back into the normal maintenance cycle. Would the derived work be part of that? I mean, do mean mandate contribution back to the original work? Do we share IP? Can the derived work be relicensed under a different license? What to do with that when the changes are merged back to the original spec?
One related question, just a clarification, related to the No-Derivatives (ND) part of the license. If someone creates a specification that uses or references the openEHR spec or any of it’s elements, from what I have read, that isn’t considered a derivative, because it’s not modifying the spec in any way. Do others have the same interpretation? Just curious because we are working on something on this area, though we might contribute it to the SEC to check if it can be formalized in openEHR.