About openLCA

Developed by GreenDelta since 2006

The idea for the openLCA project and software emerged in 2006, in discussions with Andreas Ciroth, Michael Srocka, and Jutta Hildenbrand. The goal was simple:

• Design and build a fast, reliable, high-performance, modular framework for sustainability assessment & life cycle modelling, that allows visually attractive and flexible modelling, for sophisticated and simple models, in a standard programming language, using only widely available Open Source software.

• Create a contributing programming community.

• Build modules for the framework, and enable users to build their own modules.

openLCA is exclusively run and managed by a core development team working at GreenDelta in Berlin.

Founded in 2004, GreenDelta is an independent sustainability consulting and software development company that develops and provides international services that cover all aspects of the software and sustainability consulting.

GreenDelta’s costumers are international enterprises, research and policy institutes, universities, consultancies, as well as industry SMEs and non-governmental organisations, not only in Germany, but in over hundred countries around the globe.

openLCA is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, MPL 2.0, which is an open source license.

This means, for you as user:

openLCA is completely free, without any license costs. The software is fully transparent. You can freely share both the software and any models you create in openLCA, provided the database licenses allow it. If you want you can even inspect the code for any potential issues including security issues and any malicious behaviour. This makes open source software also suited for work in highly sensitive areas.

This means, for you as software developer:

If you have an idea on how to improve or modify openLCA, feel free to do so. We’d appreciate it if you could contact us then so that we can align our work. If you distribute the modified software, then the open source license applies: you then need to publish, and make available for free, the source code of your changes (the “derived work”). You can also contact us and ask us to include the code in our distribution of openLCA (which requires that we perform a quality check of your contribution).