License

Everything is open source and free to use commercially — build them, sell them, modify them, no permission needed. Software and hardware carry different licences because they are different kinds of work.

What applies to what

Part of the project	License
Firmware, web application, documentation	`Apache-2.0`
Hardware design — schematic, PCB layout, gerbers, BOM	`CERN-OHL-P-2.0`

Apache-2.0 is written in terms of source code and object code, which does not describe a circuit board well. CERN-OHL-P is its hardware equivalent from CERN: the same permissive intent, but with wording that covers schematics, layouts and manufactured boards. Both are OSI/OSHWA-recognised and compatible with each other.

What you can do

Use it for anything, including commercially. No fee and no permission required.
Manufacture and sell boards. Build one for your team or a hundred to sell — both are fine.
Modify anything and keep your changes private. You are not obliged to publish them.
Redistribute under these terms or as part of a larger work under different terms.

Two conditions, and they are the usual ones:

Keep the copyright notice, the licence text and the NOTICE file with any copy you distribute.
State significant changes you made, so users can tell a modified version from the original.

Apache-2.0 also grants an explicit patent licence, so contributors cannot later assert patents over what they contributed. That is the main reason to prefer it over MIT for a hardware-adjacent project.

Modified firmware and competition legality

You are free to modify the firmware. Doing so does not make your board unusable — but it does change what the verification API reports.

A board running a modified build reports an fw_hash that is not in the published hash table, so it verifies as unrecognised rather than certified. That is a factual statement about which bytes are running, not a judgement about your code. If you want a modified build treated as official, it has to be published as a release here.

The certification claim is only meaningful because it is a hash of the actual running code. A modified firmware that still reported as certified would make the whole mechanism worthless.

No warranty

Both licences disclaim all warranties and liability. This is a device that enables and disables robots, so it is worth stating plainly:

OpenFC is provided as is. You are responsible for verifying it behaves correctly in your setup before relying on it, and for the safety of anyone near the field.

Trademarks

Neither licence grants trademark rights. VEX, VEX Robotics and V5 are trademarks of Innovation First, Inc. OpenFC is an independent project of Elevation Robotics and is not affiliated with, manufactured, endorsed, approved or sponsored by VEX Robotics or the REC Foundation. Those names appear here only to describe what the board is compatible with.

If you sell boards based on this design, do not imply VEX or RECF endorsement.

Attributing OpenFC

If you distribute this project or something derived from it, include a notice along these lines:

NOTICE

OpenFC — a project of Elevation Robotics
Copyright 2026 Mack Kemper
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
Hardware design licensed under CERN-OHL-P-2.0.
https://github.com/Elevation-Robotics/OpenFC

Full texts

The complete licences are in the repository as LICENSE (Apache-2.0), LICENSE-hardware (CERN-OHL-P-2.0) and NOTICE.

github.com/Elevation-Robotics/OpenFC