Country eligibility and share-back terms

An open-source licence, by the Open Source Initiative's own definition, cannot discriminate against a person, group, or field of use — including by country. A country-limited licence therefore cannot be called "open source" and cannot use an OSI-approved licence such as MPL, Apache, or GPL for the parts it limits. This is still called blueOpenHealthcare, and described as free for eligible countries or source-available.

Eligibility uses the World Bank's country income classification, published annually — an official, public list already used by lawyers and funders, rather than a bespoke cut-off. Currently the FY2027 classification (thresholds set each July; this page's country calls were checked against the live list on 2026-09-16).

• Low- and lower-middle-income countries are eligible automatically.
• Upper-middle-income countries may apply; MOBLUEHQ decides case by case.
• High-income countries need a commercial licence.
• Sanctioned countries are excluded regardless of income group.

Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Saudi Arabia are all high-income — every market where blueHealthcare is sold commercially is excluded from the free edition by the same test.

To determine whether your country is eligible for blueOpenHealthcare:

1. Visit the World Bank's country income classification page (updated annually in July — currently the FY2027 list).
2. Find your country and note its income group classification.
3. If low-income or lower-middle-income: your country is eligible. You may deploy and use blueOpenHealthcare free, provided you share back any code changes and register your deployment with MOBLUEHQ.
4. If upper-middle-income: contact MOBLUEHQ to discuss eligibility on a case-by-case basis.
5. If high-income: you need a commercial licence; contact MOBLUEHQ for pricing and terms.

Note: income classifications change. The World Bank re-classifies countries annually based on gross national income per capita. A country eligible today may move to a different group in a future year. MOBLUEHQ re-evaluates eligibility at each annual update. If you are already deployed under the free edition in a country that is later reclassified as high-income, you may continue for three more years under these terms after which a commercial licence is required.

The test is where the patients and clinics are, not where the developer lives. Anyone, anywhere, may read the code, study it, and build with synthetic data. Only production use for patients has a location test.

This programme exists for two reasons, not one. The first is that health systems that cannot pay for software can still run a signed, verifiable clinical record. The second: it is a distribution channel to developers and clinicians who already move between two health systems — much of blueHealthcare's own workforce trained or worked in the health systems this programme serves, and the free edition is how we reach them and let them build with us, not only pay us. Both are real purposes; neither is the whole story on its own.

As a condition of this licence, a deploying organisation must:

• Register each production deployment with MOBLUEHQ — organisation name, country, contact, and which modules are in use — before or within 30 days of going live.
• Send back the code of any modification, translation, or extension it distributes or puts into production, under these same terms, with a short description of what it does. MOBLUEHQ may incorporate it into the software and its commercial products.

If an eligible country is later reclassified as high-income, clinics already registered there may continue under these terms for three years, after which continued production use needs a commercial licence.

Any use not covered above — a high-income country, or a use outside "Permitted Use" — needs a commercial licence from MOBLUEHQ. Contact us.

All of it, for eligible countries: patient record and terminology, registration and scheduling, clinical notes, orders, results, medicines, lab, imaging, and integrations, together with the launcher, the receipt verifier (open to everyone), a developer kit (written, and inside the source package on the downloads page), and all eight of blueHealthcare's other clinical products (see each on the healthcare overview), plus the platform's cryptographic eSource module for clinical trials. All of it is going through a safety and security review before any of this code is published — the same prerequisites listed below, plus a per-product check for anything that could mislead a clinician or harm a patient in a country new to it. The free-edition source package is available behind this site's password gate, on the downloads page; nothing is public.

The eight separate clinical products are decided into the free edition for eligible countries, pending safety review; the installer image today contains the platform modules only, with the eight products to follow.

Order-entry decision support is not a regulated or validated medical device in any country. Drug-interaction checking will show as unavailable until a clinic connects its own licensed drug-interaction knowledge base — nothing here ships invented pharmacology.

See the open overview and the planned downloads for how this reaches a clinic.

A short list of security prerequisites has to be true first — a clean repository, closed care-team access gaps, keys that fail closed outside demo mode, and a disclosure process. See the security page for the full list.

MOBLUEHQ, Inc. runs the programme today. Contributor terms are written so that rights can pass to a non-profit foundation later, if one is formed. See governance.

• Is "not high-income under the World Bank classification on the date of first use" clear enough to enforce, and which snapshot date governs?
• Is "patients located in an eligible country" workable for cross-border hosting and telehealth?
• Is mandatory share-back of modifications enforceable across these jurisdictions — a licence condition, or a separate contractual covenant?
• Does registering a deployment's contact details create any data-protection obligation for MOBLUEHQ?
• Can the blueOpenHealthcare and "blue…" marks be licensed only to compliant users, as the practical enforcement lever?
• What must contributor terms and trademark ownership look like today so a later transfer to a non-profit foundation is clean?