Project docs

Community Edition with a commercial path.

Acorn CCMS is open source first. The commercial model is built around hosting, implementation, migration, training, support, reliability, and commercial licensing.

Product model

Editions

Community

Community Edition

Public AGPL source code for self-hosters, contributors, developers, and centres that want to run Acorn themselves.

Managed

Managed Cloud

Hosted Acorn CCMS with backups, monitoring, upgrades, private support, and operational assistance.

Paid

Support Offering

Self-hosting setup, migration, upgrades, training, custom workflows, reporting, and priority troubleshooting.

Help channels

Support

Community issuesUse GitHub issues for reproducible bugs, documentation gaps, and Community Edition feature proposals.

Paid self-hosting supportAvailable for installation, migration, upgrades, custom workflows, reporting, integrations, and training.

Managed Cloud supportFor hosted centres using the official managed service once onboarding is available.

Security issuesReport vulnerabilities privately. Do not open public issues for security bugs.

Request support

AGPL

Licensing

Acorn CCMS Community Edition is licensed under `AGPL-3.0-only`. If someone modifies Acorn CCMS and runs it as a service for users, the AGPL requires source availability for that modified version.

The AGPL does not force every modification to be submitted upstream as a pull request. It requires corresponding source availability to users of modified network services. Upstream contributions are encouraged because they reduce long-term fork maintenance.

Read licensing guide

Community Edition rights, AGPL obligations, commercial path, and contributor licensing notes.

Commercial licensing

For organisations that need terms outside AGPL for proprietary distribution or private hosted derivatives.

Project identity

Trademarks

The Acorn CCMS name, logo, and project identity are separate from the software licence. Forks and third-party hosted services must avoid implying they are the official project or official managed service.

Read trademark policy

Community

Contributing

Contributions should strengthen Community Edition while protecting safety, privacy, tenant isolation, and centre-data handling.

No secrets, real centre records, or real child/family/staff data. Tenant-scoped queries preserve organisation and centre isolation. Schema changes include the intended Prisma migration path. Docs are updated when setup, deployment, or edition boundaries change.

Direction

Roadmap themes

Public readiness

CI, lint/build health, stronger self-hosting docs, security hardening, and cleaner release process.

Centre workflows

Parent-facing workflows, daily reports, ratio alerts, programming depth, and compliance polish.

Commercial readiness

Support intake, managed cloud waitlist, demo environment, support terms, privacy policy, and onboarding material.

Community growth

Contributor process, roadmap issues, project governance, and clearer first-good-issue paths.