OpenWork, an opensource Claude Cowork alternative, is silently relicensing under a commercial license

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA / 4/9/2026

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OpenWork was originally presented as an MIT-licensed open-source “Claude Cowork alternative,” but the article warns that some components have been silently relicensed under a commercial license.
The project’s overall license was reportedly modified to limit how far the MIT license applies, creating uncertainty about whether the project still qualifies as truly MIT-licensed.
The post points readers to a specific GitHub issue and a commit that allegedly omitted the licensing changes in their description.
The author notes that developers may need commercial licensing to fund work, but criticizes the lack of any public announcement or clear communication about the change.
Users relying on the previous licensing may need to review OpenWork’s repository history and component-level licenses to understand compliance implications.

OpenWork is a locally hosted AI agent harness that was presented as a MIT-licensed opensource Claude Cowork alternative based on opencode.

Just a heads up for any user of the app that it has silently relicensed some components under a commercial license and modified the overall project's MIT license to limit its reach (which I am not even sure makes it a MIT license anymore).

More details here: https://github.com/different-ai/openwork/issues/1412

Note that as a fellow opensource developer myself, I perfectly understand the need to secure income streams to be able to continue working on packages the public loves, but these changes were not announced anywhere and the likely AI-generated commit's description omitted the licensing changes, somehow...

/PS: I deleted a previous post because there was a typo in the title that made people think it was about OpenCode.

submitted by /u/lrq3000
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