Why Open Source Is the Right Model for GRC Software

GRC is a trust business. You store risk registers, control assessments, audit evidence, policies, vulnerability reports. This is the most sensitive data in the company — a complete map of every weakness, every gap, every risk your organisation faces. And you're putting it into software you can't inspect.

The trust problem with closed-source GRC

Every closed-source GRC platform asks you to make an extraordinary leap of faith. Trust that your data is handled correctly. Trust that the logic is sound. Trust that there are no backdoors. Trust that when they say "your data is encrypted at rest," it actually is.

You can't verify any of it. You can't inspect the code that processes your risk assessments. You can't audit the logic that scores your controls. You can't confirm that your compliance data isn't being used to train models, shared with partners, or stored in ways that contradict what you were told.

And then there's lock-in. Your risk register, your policies, your control mappings, your years of audit evidence — all trapped in a proprietary format behind a proprietary API. Switching vendors means starting over. The cost of leaving is so high that you never leave, even when the product stops serving you.

Why AGPL

Not all open-source licences are equal. We chose the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) deliberately. AGPL is copyleft — it ensures that improvements come back to the community. If someone takes the code and builds a hosted service, they must release their modifications.

This prevents the "strip-mine" model where cloud providers take open-source code, wrap a managed service around it, and give nothing back. With AGPL, the community always benefits. Every improvement, every bug fix, every extension is shared.

Permissive licences like MIT or Apache let companies take without giving. That's fine for libraries. For a platform that handles an organisation's most sensitive compliance data, we believe copyleft is the right choice — it keeps the ecosystem honest.

RiskReady Community Edition

RiskReady Community Edition is a complete, genuinely useful GRC platform — not a crippled demo or a feature-gated trial. It includes 9 working modules: Risk Management, Compliance Management, Policy Management, Control Management, Audit Management, Incident Management, Vendor Management, Asset Management, and Document Management.

It's free forever. Self-hostable with Docker Compose. No usage limits, no user caps, no time bombs. If RiskReady the company disappeared tomorrow, the Community Edition would keep running on your infrastructure.

The open core model

The open core model is simple: the platform is open, the intelligence is the product. Community Edition gives you a world-class GRC tool. All paid tiers add the AI methodology, the cross-framework intelligence, the benchmark data, and the managed infrastructure that make autonomous compliance possible — every feature at every price point.

Open code builds trust. AI methodology is the moat.

We're not worried about competitors seeing our code. The platform is the distribution engine — it gets RiskReady into organisations. The AI methodology, the statistical data, the expert knowledge system — that's what makes autonomous compliance work, and that's what organisations pay for.

You can fork the Community Edition tomorrow. You'll get a solid GRC platform. But you won't get the AI that knows ISO 27001 methodology, the benchmark data from hundreds of implementations, or the MCP integration that turns compliance from a manual process into an autonomous one.

Community benefits

Open source isn't just about transparency — it's about leverage. The community can audit the code and verify security claims. Contributors can fix bugs, extend modules, add integrations. Organisations can run on their own infrastructure with complete control over their data.

When a security researcher finds a vulnerability, they can see exactly what's affected and submit a fix. When an organisation has a unique requirement, they can extend the platform instead of waiting for a vendor roadmap. When a regulator asks "what does this software do with our data?" — you can show them the code.

The long-term vision

We're building toward the largest open-source GRC community in the world. A place where compliance professionals, security engineers, auditors, and developers collaborate on the tools that protect organisations. Where best practices are shared in code, not locked behind consulting agreements.

GRC software should be as trustworthy as the compliance programmes it supports. Open source is the only model that delivers that.