Policy & Positions

The OpenAEC Foundation aims to reverse engineer all closed binary formats (closed binary formats) used in construction via the clean room principle.

This is fully permitted under European law based on EU Software Directive 2009/24/EC, Article 6, which expressly allows reverse engineering for interoperability purposes. The goal is to make these formats compatible with the open ecosystem.

Our approach:

• We develop our own implementations without using proprietary source code
• All analysis is based on publicly available specifications and independent research
• No confidential documentation or leaked information from third parties is used
• The resulting implementations are fully open source

See also the Clean Room Declaration on our disclaimer page for the legal basis of this approach.

Position: everything needed to submit a permit application must be 100% freely accessible to all citizens and companies.

Software needed for submitting, viewing or validating permit applications must not create a financial or technical barrier. This applies to both file formats and the applications that process them.

Our positions:

• The government must not depend on proprietary software for its public processes
• Every citizen and company must be able to comply with legal submission obligations without license costs
• Open standards and open source software are essential for a democratic and accessible construction process
• Permit authorities should base their systems on open, documented formats

The OpenAEC Foundation develops free tools that guarantee this access, regardless of which commercial software other parties in the process use.

The OpenAEC Foundation uses IFC and IFCX as the basis for all data exchange in the AEC industry. These open standards managed by buildingSMART International guarantee that construction data remains readable and exchangeable, independent of software choices.

Our core principles:

• No vendor lock-in — proprietary formats should never be the only way to store or exchange data
• Sustainable readability — all data must remain readable, regardless of which software you use or which vendor still exists
• Interoperability as a right — the ability to export data to open formats is a fundamental user requirement, not a premium feature
• Standards over formats — we build on and contribute to open standards, not competing closed ecosystems

The OpenAEC Foundation believes that construction data belongs to the user — not to the software provider, not to the cloud, and not to us.

Our principles:

• Local where possible — all tools run locally on your device by default, without a server connection
• No tracking — we do not collect usage data, analytics or telemetry
• No data collection — your project data, models and documents never leave your computer, unless you explicitly and consciously initiate it
• Transparent code — because all our software is open source, you can verify yourself that these promises are kept

For hosted services (such as OpenAEC Cloud), a separate, also published privacy policy applies. Minimal data collection is also central to that policy.