Ollama
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
Get up and running with Llama 3.3, DeepSeek-R1, Phi-4, Gemma 3, and other large language models.
MIT is the default answer to "can I build a business on this?". There is no copyleft, no network clause and no patent grant to negotiate — you keep the notice and you are done. The real risk with MIT projects is not legal, it is commercial: if the code is free to fork, so is your product, and your moat has to sit somewhere other than the source.
MIT lets you fork, modify, close the source and sell the result. The only obligation is preserving the copyright notice and licence text. This dataset tracks 368 MIT projects (22% of 1665 total), 222 of them actively maintained, led by Ollama with 179k stars. Verified against repository metadata as of August 2026; this is engineering guidance, not legal advice.
Running the software inside your own company, without redistributing it, is permitted under every licence family here except undeclared/proprietary code.
Permitted. You can host, modify, close your changes and charge for access with no obligation beyond attribution.
Permitted. Keep the notices, rename the product, and expect competitors to do the same to you.
| Project | Category | Stars | Maintenance | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ollama | Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) | 179k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Hoppscotch Community Edition | Software Development | 80k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| code-server | Software Development | 79k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Strapi | Content Management Systems (CMS) | 73k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| revealjs | Miscellaneous | 72k | Slowing down | MIT |
| AnythingLLM | Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) | 65k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Traefik | Web Servers | 64k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Memos | Note-taking & Editors | 62k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| PocketBase | Software Development | 61k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| MeiliSearch | Search Engines | 59k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Gitea | Software Development | 57k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Joplin | Note-taking & Editors | 56k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Ghost | Blogging Platforms | 55k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Huginn | Automation | 50k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| LocalAI | Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) | 48k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Gogs | Software Development | 48k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Cal.diy | Booking and Scheduling | 48k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| copyparty | File Transfer | 46k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Rocket.Chat | Communication | 46k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| RSSHub | Feed Readers | 46k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Payload CMS | Content Management Systems (CMS) | 44k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| LibreChat | Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) | 42k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Reactive Resume | Miscellaneous | 40k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Novu | Communication | 40k | Actively maintained | MIT |
| Umami | Analytics | 38k | Actively maintained | MIT |
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
Get up and running with Llama 3.3, DeepSeek-R1, Phi-4, Gemma 3, and other large language models.
Alternative to Postman, API development
Fast and beautiful API request builder.
Software Development
VS Code in the browser, hosted on a remote server.
Alternative to Contentful, Content Management System/ CMS
The most advanced open-source Content Management Framework (headless-CMS) to build powerful API with no effort.
Miscellaneous
Framework for easily creating beautiful presentations using HTML.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
All-in-one desktop & Docker AI application with built-in RAG, AI agents, No-code agent builder, MCP compatibility, and more.
Web Servers
HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy.
Note-taking & Editors
Knowledge base that works with a SQLite db file.
Alternative to Firebase
Backend for your next SaaS and Mobile app in one file.
Alternative to Algolia, Search
Ultra relevant, instant and typo-tolerant full-text search API.
Alternative to Code hosting & collaboration
Git with a cup of tea! Painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service, including Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD.
Alternative to Evernote, Onenote, Roam Research, Note-taking/ Knowledge management, Note-taking / Personal Knowledge Management
Note taking application with markdown editor and encryption support for mobile and desktop platforms. Runs client-side and syncs through a self hosted Nextcloud instance or similar (alternative to Eve
Alternative to Medium, Substack, Company blogs/ newsletters, Web CMS and Blog Engines
Just a blogging platform.
Automation
Build agents that monitor and act on your behalf.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
Run your AI models locally and generate images and audio (alternative to OpenAI and Claude).
Alternative to Code hosting & collaboration
Painless self-hosted Git Service written in Go.
Booking and Scheduling
Online appointment scheduling system.
File Transfer
Portable file server with accelerated resumable uploads, deduplication, WebDAV, FTP, zeroconf, media indexer, video thumbnails, audio transcoding, and write-only folders, in a single file with no mand
Alternative to Slack, Team communication, Chat & Team Communication
Communications platform that puts data protection first (alternative to Gitter.im and Slack).
Feed Readers
Easy to use, and extensible RSS feed aggregator capable of generating RSS feeds from pretty much everything ranging from social media to university departments.
Alternative to Content Management System/ CMS
Developer-first headless CMS and application framework.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
Enhanced ChatGPT-compatible AI chat interface supporting multiple AI providers, with multi-user auth, message search, and plugin support.
Miscellaneous
One-of-a-kind resume builder that keeps your privacy in mind. Completely secure, customizable, portable, open-source and free forever.
Alternative to Courier, MagicBell, Knock, Notification infrastructure, Push notifications
Notification infrastructure for developers.
Alternative to Web analytics
Simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.
Alternative to Amplitude, MixPanel, Product analytics
Product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and a/b testing that you can self-host (alternative to Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, HotJar, Optimizely).
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
AI-powered search engine (alternative to Perplexity AI).
Alternative to Shopify, Ecwid, Online store builder
Headless commerce engine that enables developers to create amazing digital commerce experiences.
Video Surveillance
Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI.
Web Servers
Docker container for managing Nginx proxy hosts with a simple, powerful interface.
Analytics
Visualizer for neural network and machine learning models.
Software Development
LLM engineering platform for model tracing, prompt management, and application evaluation. Langfuse helps teams collaboratively debug, analyze, and iterate on their LLM applications such as chatbots o
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
Chat UI that works with any LLM. It comes loaded with advanced features like agents, web search, RAG, MCP, deep research, Connectors to 40+ knowledge sources, and more.
Media Streaming
A simple, high efficiency and real-time video server, supports RTMP, WebRTC, HLS, HTTP-FLV and SRT.
Miscellaneous
Platform for secrets, certificates, and privileged access management.
Money, Budgeting & Management
Local-first personal finance tool based on zero-sum budgeting, supporting synchronization across devices, custom rules, manual transaction importing (from QIF, OFX, and QFX files), and optional automa
Archiving and Digital Preservation (DP)
Create HTML & screenshot archives of sites from your bookmarks, browsing history, RSS feeds, or other sources (alternative to Wayback Machine).
Alternative to Shopify, Ecwid, Online store builder
Leading Laravel open source e-commerce framework with multi-inventory sources, taxation, localization, dropshipping and more exciting features.
Personal Dashboards
Feature-rich homepage for your homelab, with easy YAML configuration.
Alternative to Zapier, Tray, Workflow automation
No-code business automation tool like Zapier or Tray. For example, you can send a Slack notification for each new Trello card.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM solution for SMEs and Enterprises for complete customer lifecycle management.
Miscellaneous
Web AI firewall utility which protects upstream resources from scraper bots.
Task Management & To-do Lists
Advanced todo list app with integrated timeboxing and time tracking capabilities. Integrates with Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Redmine and OpenProject.
Alternative to Kanban board
Open-source Trello-like kanban.
Media Streaming
Ready-to-use, zero-dependency real-time media server and proxy to publish, read, record, playback and route video/audio streams over SRT, WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP, HLS, MPEG-TS, RTP.
Alternative to Zendesk
UVDesk community is a service oriented, event driven extensible opensource helpdesk system that can be used by your organization to provide efficient support to your clients effortlessly whichever way
Bookmarks and Link Sharing
Bookmark and archive manager to store your useful links.
Communication
Production-ready fullstack but simple mail server (SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, Antispam, Antivirus, etc.) running inside a container. Only configuration files, no SQL database.
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MIT lets you fork, modify, close the source and sell the result. The only obligation is preserving the copyright notice and licence text. MIT is the default answer to "can I build a business on this?". There is no copyleft, no network clause and no patent grant to negotiate — you keep the notice and you are done. The real risk with MIT projects is not legal, it is commercial: if the code is free to fork, so is your product, and your moat has to sit somewhere other than the source.
368 of 1665 tracked projects carry a MIT licence — about 22%. 222 of them show real momentum (commits in most of the last twelve months plus a recent release), so the practical shortlist is smaller than the raw count suggests.
Licence breach is copyright infringement, and the usual consequence is not a lawsuit — it is a failed diligence review. Acquirers and Series A investors run automated licence scans over your dependency tree; an unresolved copyleft or source-available dependency in a closed product either delays the deal or gets priced into it. The cheap fix is choosing correctly at week one.
Yes — MIT is an OSI-approved open-source licence family. What varies is the obligation that comes attached, not whether the code is open.
Licence data comes from repository metadata and can lag a relicensing event. Confirm the LICENSE file in the repository before shipping. This page is engineering guidance, not legal advice.
IdeaProof checks whether your idea is already built, how saturated the category is, and where the remaining wedge sits — in about two minutes.
Validate your idea freeSearch this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.