Prusa adds plugin-based flexibility to Open Community License 1.1

Prusa’s June 24 update to Open Community License 1.1 gives maker projects a new plugin layer that can add conditions for attribution, revenue thresholds, or R&D restrictions without replacing the core license. For people remixing printer CAD, that turns the old all-or-nothing choice into something more workable: a modified part can stay open, but the licensor can still set the business terms.

The practical shift is in how the license handles real workshop behavior. A designer can now require attribution on a shared remix, put a revenue threshold around commercial use, or narrow how a company uses the design for research and development without forcing a full rewrite of the license text. The revised terms also tighten copyleft so derivatives stay under OCL, broaden business-use rights, and clarify the intellectual-property scope. The original OCL was designed to fit on one page and to fill the gaps left when software licenses get pushed onto physical hardware, where a file, a part, and a manufactured product do not behave the same way.

Prusa released the CORE One CAD files under OCL five months before the update, and thousands of projects have already been published under the license, including work from research groups at UC Berkeley and MIT.

The GitHub repository includes a separate examples directory built around practical scenarios for applying the license. Those examples cover hobbyist modification and sharing and more structured commercial cases.

The Open Source Initiative’s review process decides which licenses pass as open source under community norms and expectations. Prusa’s OCL is a custom hardware-focused license, and v1.1 makes it more flexible without making it the same thing as OSI-approved software licensing.