Licence
NEXT HMI is free and open-source software under AGPL-3.0. Most people who run it owe nothing and pay nothing, forever. This page is the short, practical version; the binding text is in LICENSING.md and LICENSE.
What you get, free
The open-source build is the whole product. Historian, alarms, recipes, users and groups, peer transfer, the editor, the custom-widget SDK — all of it is in the box.
In the open-source build there is no licence key, no feature unlock and no runtime check anywhere in the code. Nothing phones home, nothing expires, nothing counts your tags, your screens or your operators.
A separate enterprise build exists for regulated plants that need an audit trail. It is proprietary, is not this build, and is activated with a licence key — if your manager opened on an activation screen asking for one, you are running it, and its own Licensing page covers what the key does. Nothing on this page changes: the enterprise build is an addition, not a piece taken out of the free one.
Does the AGPL ask anything of me?
Almost certainly not. Its obligations start only when you redistribute a build or serve a modified build over a network — and then only for changes to the platform.
| What you're doing | What the AGPL asks |
|---|---|
| Running NEXT HMI on your plant network, unmodified — commercially, at any scale | Nothing. |
| Building projects, widgets and themes with it | Nothing. Your project content is yours (see below). |
| Handing a colleague the official zip | Nothing beyond passing the licence along. |
| Shipping a modified NEXT HMI inside your machines | Offer your recipients the source of what you shipped — or buy a commercial licence instead. |
| Offering a modified NEXT HMI as a hosted service | Same, under AGPL §13, to your network users. |
The AGPL never requires payment. A commercial licence is the alternative to complying with the source-disclosure terms, not a fee the licence imposes.
Your project content is yours
The copyleft covers the platform — backend, runtime, editor. It does not reach the content you author with it:
- pages, layouts, widget trees and property expressions
- themes and token overrides
- translations
- datasource configurations
- alarms, recipes, users, and the rest of the per-project configuration
- custom widgets you author under
custom-widgets/<Name>/index.tsx
You own all of it outright. Keep it private, license it how you like, ship it as part of a commercial product — with no obligation to release it under the AGPL and no obligation to disclose it under §13. This is stated explicitly so that a strict reading of "derivative work" can't be used to claim otherwise; the full text is in LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md.
A custom widget consumes documented runtime globals on window.__nextHMI__. Using a documented interface does not make your widget a derivative of the platform.
The attribution notice
Every load of the operator runtime shows a boot screen with the product logo and the AGPL-3.0 notice, for a minimum of two seconds. That notice is the open-source build's attribution.
The open-source build has no setting for it: the notice is bound to the edition, not to project configuration. White-labelling requires a commercial licence, whose build drops the notice and adds a single Boot logo setting (shell.bootLogo) that puts your own logo on the boot screen in place of the product mark and name.
That setting is bound to the edition too — the open-source build ignores it, so a white-labelled project opened there shows the product branding again. Nothing verifies a licence at runtime, in either build.
When you'd want a commercial licence
Three situations, none of which apply to a plant that just runs the thing:
- You redistribute a modified build — a machine builder embedding NEXT HMI in shipped equipment, an integrator delivering a modified build to clients, a SaaS vendor hosting one. Priced per shipped unit.
- You want to white-label — replace the boot-screen logo with your own and drop the notice.
- You want support, an SLA, or a contractual counterparty — available to everyone, including AGPL users who never redistribute. It adds a support relationship, never a different binary. Release binaries are currently unsigned; when signing lands it applies to the public release for everyone, not as a paid tier.
How to buy is in COMMERCIAL.md.
Bundled third-party components
Two runtime dependencies are LGPL rather than AGPL — asyncua (the OPC-UA client) and zeroconf (LAN peer discovery), both used unmodified. In the portable and Docker builds they ship as loose, replaceable package directories under lgpl/ beside the executable rather than frozen inside it, so a recipient can substitute their own build. Their full licence texts travel with every release.
The complete third-party inventory is in NOTICE.