OpenAEC Foundation
Frequently asked questions about open source in construction, our revenue model and the future of the ecosystem.
The AEC sector is one of the last major industries still running entirely on closed, proprietary software. That brings high licensing costs, vendor lock-in and dependence on a handful of suppliers.
Open source changes that fundamentally:
Yes — all OpenAEC tools stay free and open source, forever. That's not a marketing promise, it's a licensing matter: all tools are licensed under LGPL-3.0. We cannot unilaterally revoke that license. Even if the foundation stops tomorrow or pivots, the current code remains freely available to everyone.
What if development of one of our tools stops?
That can happen — not every tool stays under our active development. But because everything is open source, anyone can take over the project, fork it, or integrate its ideas into their own tool. A nice example is CalcPAD: the open-source variant of that calculation tool was discontinued, and we have integrated a significant part of its ideas into Open Calculations Studio. Open source guarantees that good ideas don't disappear with a company.
No freemium, no surprise paywall, no vendor lock-in. What is free today is free tomorrow. Our revenue comes from services around the ecosystem (see our revenue model) — not from selling licenses.
We see it differently. We develop all software within OpenAEC using AI coding — not as an experiment, but as a deliberate way of working. That deserves explanation, because it's a new way of developing that still takes some getting used to.
Our position: quality depends on how you check it, not on who writes it. We have a programming background ourselves, but the bulk of what the AI produces we don't understand line-by-line. And that's fine. What matters is whether the result is correct. We steer for that through:
Traditionally developed software is also dependent on humans, and human errors have been the largest cause of bugs for decades. AI errors are not more dangerous — they're distributed differently. The safety nets above catch both kinds.
"But humans can't maintain the generated code" — today (May 2026) there's still a kernel of truth in that. AI code is not always as readable as hand-written code. But consider where we've come from: at the beginning of 2026 the output was significantly worse than now. Half a year from now we'll see another big step forward, and maintenance will increasingly be done by AI as well — under our direction.
More important than the current level is the direction of the movement. Our position — and it is still debatable today (May 2026) for some — is that within six months to a year AI coding will be not just faster and cheaper, but qualitatively better than what most human developers write today. The direction is unmistakable; only the exact pace varies between estimates.
"What if the AI vendor stops or triples its prices?" — no problem. We are vendor-independent. Anthropic Claude is our current primary choice, but OpenAI, xAI Grok, Google Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek and Qwen are directly interchangeable. And local models (Llama, Qwen open-weights) run on an ordinary GPU. Even at tripled token prices, AI coding remains more economically attractive than a team of full-time traditional developers.
The conclusion: AI coding is no longer an experiment. Twenty tools, five thousand downloads, supporters using them in production — all built this way. We don't pretend AI coding works without discipline, but discipline is no reason to reject the technique. It's reason to embrace it, with the right safety nets in place.
For now we are investing heavily to get the full ecosystem working this year. Everything is and will remain open source. You can download it all via our GitHub.
As a foundation we provide services around the ecosystem:
Absolutely. All tools are open source and can be installed independently on your own server. Most tools offer Docker images for easy deployment. You have full control over your data and infrastructure.
If you'd rather not manage it yourself, we offer managed hosting with an SLA.
All tools in the ecosystem are built on the same stack: Tauri 2.0 (Rust backend) with a web frontend. This means every tool runs as a desktop application (Windows, macOS, Linux), as a web app and as a mobile app — from the same codebase.
Read more on our architecture page.
There are several ways to contribute: