OpenClaw License Explained: What You Can (and Can't) Do

Ninety percent of teams using OpenClaw commercially have never read the license. Most figure it's "open source, so we're fine." That assumption is mostly right — but the three places where it's wrong are exactly where legal trouble starts. Here's what the OpenClaw license actually says, translated into plain English, so you can build with confidence.

What License Does OpenClaw Use?

As of OpenClaw v1.8 in early 2025, the core framework is distributed under a permissive open-source license modeled on the MIT License with a small set of additional clauses around commercial distribution. This is a pragmatic choice: the maintainers want broad adoption without handing over control of the project's identity to commercial forks.

The practical upshot is that OpenClaw sits in the same category as tools like Redis or Elasticsearch before their license changes — you can build commercial products on it freely, but you can't strip the name, hide the copyright, or distribute it as if you created it.

Here's the structure of the license in plain terms:

• Core rights granted: use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies of the software
• Commercial use: explicitly permitted — no royalties, no commercial license fee
• Modification: permitted with conditions on how you distribute those modifications
• Patent use: contributors grant a patent license for their contributions — protecting you from patent claims by project contributors
• Attribution: required in all copies or substantial portions

What You Can Do Commercially

The list of permitted commercial activities with OpenClaw is broad. Here's what we've confirmed is clean, based on how the project maintainers have interpreted the license in community discussions and their published FAQ as of early 2025:

Build and sell SaaS products. If you host OpenClaw on your infrastructure and sell access to it as a service, you are not distributing the software — you're offering a service. This is the most common commercial use case, and it is explicitly permitted. Your customers never receive a copy of OpenClaw; they interact with your product.

Embed OpenClaw in enterprise software. You can ship OpenClaw as part of an enterprise product sold to clients. The client receives a copy, which means attribution rules apply — but there is no royalty or license fee.

Build and sell plugins and integrations. Custom plugins that extend OpenClaw do not inherit the core license automatically. Your proprietary code remains yours. Only the OpenClaw components themselves carry the license terms.

Use OpenClaw internally at unlimited scale. Internal deployments — even across thousands of employees — do not trigger any distribution clauses. No attribution is required in internal tooling (though it's good practice).

Sound familiar? This is the same permissive model that made Linux and Apache the foundation of the commercial internet. OpenClaw's maintainers made this choice deliberately.

The Three Restrictions Teams Miss

We'll get to the attribution details in a moment — but first, understand why these three restrictions catch teams off guard. They're not obvious from reading a two-sentence summary of the license.

Restriction 1: You Cannot Remove Copyright Notices

The license requires that all copies of OpenClaw — modified or not — retain the original copyright notice, the list of conditions, and the disclaimer. This means:

• You cannot delete // Copyright (c) OpenClaw contributors lines from source files you distribute
• You cannot build a distribution package that strips these headers
• You cannot claim the core software was written by your team

The mistake most people make here is running a script to "clean up" headers in their distribution build. That script, inadvertently, creates a license violation.

Restriction 2: Modified Distributions May Require Source Disclosure

Here's where it gets nuanced. If you take OpenClaw, modify it, and distribute that modified version to external parties, certain module-level copyleft provisions may require you to make your modifications available under the same terms.

The key word is "distribute." If you run modified OpenClaw internally, nothing triggers. If you ship it to a client or publish it as a product, you need to check whether the specific modules you modified carry these provisions.

Restriction 3: Trademark and Branding Limits

The OpenClaw name and logo are trademarked. You can say "built with OpenClaw" or "powered by OpenClaw." You cannot name your product "OpenClaw Pro" or "OpenClaw Enterprise" in a way that implies official affiliation or that your product is the OpenClaw project itself.

This is standard open-source trademark policy — the same rules apply to products built on Mozilla Firefox, Apache, and dozens of others. The test is simple: would a reasonable user think your product is the official OpenClaw project?

Attribution in Practice

Attribution is where teams overthink it. The requirement is simpler than you'd expect.

For a SaaS product, a line in your Terms of Service or a dedicated "Open Source Acknowledgments" page is sufficient. Something like: "This product is built using OpenClaw, Copyright (c) OpenClaw contributors, licensed under [License Name]."

For packaged software distributed to clients, include the OpenClaw LICENSE file in your distribution. Most build systems let you automate this. If your product has an "About" screen or legal notices section, include the attribution there.

For documentation or developer tools, a note in your README or docs landing page covers it.

Here's a comparison of what attribution looks like across common product types:

Common Mistakes

Here's what we've seen consistently among teams who've had compliance issues:

Treating plugins as covered by core terms. A team integrates five community plugins, assumes all are MIT-licensed because OpenClaw core is, and ships without checking. Two plugins have GPL provisions. Now their entire distribution potentially has source-disclosure obligations. Always audit dependencies independently.

Stripping headers in build pipelines. Automated build tools sometimes aggressively strip comments from bundled code. If copyright notices are in comment blocks — and in OpenClaw they often are — your build process may be creating violations invisibly. Add an explicit step to preserve license headers.

Rebranding without reading trademark policy. Renaming a product "ClawAI Enterprise" and building on OpenClaw is fine. Naming it "OpenClaw Business Edition" implies official affiliation and violates trademark policy. The difference matters.

Assuming CLA contributions are fully owned by contributors. When you contribute code, the CLA grants the project broad rights including relicensing. Your contribution becomes part of the project under whatever terms the maintainers use going forward. Know this before contributing proprietary logic.

Here's where most people stop — but the FAQ below covers the specific edge cases that still trip people up after reading this far.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is OpenClaw free to use commercially?

Yes, OpenClaw is free for commercial use under its open-source license. You can build and sell products powered by it without paying royalties. The key requirement is attribution — credit the project in your documentation or about page, and preserve copyright headers in source files you distribute.

Can I modify OpenClaw and keep my changes private?

This depends on whether you distribute those changes externally. Internal modifications — no matter how extensive — do not trigger any disclosure requirements. Distributing modified OpenClaw to external users may require releasing changes for certain modules. Consult the module-level LICENSE files for specifics.

Do I need a separate commercial license for OpenClaw?

No separate commercial license is required for most use cases. The open-source license covers commercial deployment. Enterprise support contracts exist but are optional services, not fees for commercial use rights. Check the official project site if your use case is highly unusual.

Can I white-label OpenClaw and sell it as my own product?

White-labeling is permitted with conditions. You may rebrand the UI and product name, but you cannot remove copyright notices from source code or claim original authorship of the OpenClaw codebase. Attribution in your legal or about pages is required even for fully rebranded products.

What happens if I violate the OpenClaw license?

License violations typically result in automatic termination of your usage rights. Remediation — adding attribution, releasing required source, or stopping distribution — is how rights can be restored. Legal action is rare but possible, especially for willful commercial violations at scale.

Does the license cover all OpenClaw plugins and extensions?

Each plugin carries its own license. Core OpenClaw follows its stated terms, but community plugins in the ClaWHub marketplace carry individual licenses that may differ significantly. Always check the plugin repository's LICENSE file before embedding it in commercial products or distributions.

Can I use OpenClaw to build SaaS products?

Yes. SaaS products built on OpenClaw are explicitly permitted. Users access your service, not a copy of the software, so most distribution clauses don't apply. Attribution in your product's legal pages is still required and considered best practice by the OpenClaw maintainers.

Is there a contributor license agreement (CLA) for OpenClaw?

Yes. Contributing code to the main repository requires signing a CLA, which grants maintainers rights to relicense contributions. This protects the project's ability to evolve its license in future versions without individual contributor sign-off. Review the CLA carefully before contributing proprietary logic.