Licensing & legal
This page is the complete licensing picture for FerroEHR: what the project’s own code is licensed under, which third-party material ships inside the repository and container images, and the trademark and lineage acknowledgments. It is a summary for evaluators and deployers, not legal advice.
- FerroEHR’s own code — MIT
- Vendored third-party material
- Rust dependencies
- Trademarks and lineage
- Questions
FerroEHR’s own code — MIT
Everything written for this project — the server and application crates, the code generator and tooling, and the generated openEHR specification crates (they are this project’s own emitted Rust) — is licensed under the MIT License. You can use, modify, and redistribute it freely, including commercially, provided the copyright and permission notice are preserved.
Vendored third-party material
The repository vendors external material verbatim — machine-readable specification artifacts the code generator consumes, the openEHR specification text used as the conformance oracle, and real-world clinical models and fixtures used as test corpora. Each family keeps its upstream license:
| Material | Upstream | License |
|---|---|---|
| openEHR machine-readable artifacts (BMM meta-models, XML Schemas, OpenAPI, JSON Schemas) | the openEHR specifications-ITS-* repositories | Apache-2.0 |
| openEHR specification text (the conformance reference) | the openEHR specifications-* repositories | CC-BY-SA 3.0 |
| Clinical models (archetypes and templates) from the openEHR Clinical Knowledge Manager and the openEHR ADL archetype library | ckm.openehr.org, openEHR/adl-archetypes | per-file licence metadata, predominantly CC-BY-SA 3.0 |
Test corpora (archie fixtures, Better web-template-tests, EHRbase SDK canonical-JSON data) | Nedap, Better Ltd, vitasystems | Apache-2.0 |
Every vendored tree in the repository carries a PROVENANCE.md naming its
exact upstream source, pinned revision, and license, with the upstream
LICENSE file vendored alongside where the source publishes one.
The CC-BY-SA specification text and clinical models are redistributed verbatim, with attribution — they are reference and test material, not part of the compiled server. The FerroEHR binary you deploy is built from MIT code plus Apache-2.0-licensed machine-readable inputs.
Rust dependencies
All third-party Rust crates are pinned in the workspace manifest and
license-gated in CI with cargo deny (licenses, security advisories, bans,
and sources are all checked on every change). No copyleft crate licenses are
admitted by that gate.
Trademarks and lineage
- openEHR® is the registered trademark of the openEHR Foundation. FerroEHR is an independent implementation of the openEHR specifications and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the openEHR Foundation.
- FerroEHR began as a fork of EHRbase, developed by vitasystems GmbH and the Peter L. Reichertz Institute, and keeps that lineage in its git history. Upstream EHRbase remains Apache-2.0; no code from it is present in this tree. FerroEHR is not affiliated with or endorsed by the upstream project.
Questions
If you need a clarification for a compliance review, open a
GitHub discussion or issue
— provenance questions can usually be answered by pointing at the exact
PROVENANCE.md and upstream pin.