Legal · Licensing
Software Licence
Which parts of Ligand-X are free, what noncommercial means in practice, and how Pro and academic licences work. Effective 11 August 2026.
Two licences, one product
Ligand-X ships as a free core platform with optional Pro modules. They are licensed differently, and this page explains which is which in plain terms. The licence texts themselves are authoritative; this page is a guide to them, not a substitute. All Ligand-X licences are granted by Ligand-X Inc..
Core platform and launcher
The Ligand-X core platform and the desktop launcher are licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. That covers structure preparation, pocket finding, molecular docking, molecular dynamics, alignment, and the workbench itself. Under that licence you may use, copy, modify, and share the software freely for any noncommercial purpose, provided you keep the licence and attribution notices intact. The full licence text ships with the software and is published at polyformproject.org.
What “noncommercial” actually means
This is the part worth being clear about, because “free” on its own is ambiguous. Noncommercial means use that is not primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage. Academic research, teaching, personal study, and evaluation are covered. Using Ligand-X as part of the work of a for-profit company — including drug discovery programmes, contract research, and consulting deliverables — is not. If your use is commercial, the core platform needs a commercial licence too. Tell us what you are doing and we will sort out the right agreement: support@ligand-x.com.
Pro modules
The Pro modules — including ADMET, quantum chemistry, structure and affinity prediction, absolute and relative binding free energy, reaction kinetics, QM/MM, and generative design — are proprietary software owned by Ligand-X Inc. They are distributed as private container images and are not open source. No licence to use, copy, modify, or distribute them is granted except under a valid Ligand-X licence or a separate written agreement. Access to the private image registry is part of that licence.
Academic licences
Academic licences include every Pro module, free of charge. They are not a reduced tier and not a time-limited trial. They are issued to individuals at recognised academic and non-profit research institutions for noncommercial research and teaching, and they carry the same obligations as any other licence: no redistribution, no sublicensing, and no commercial use. Industry-funded work at an academic institution may still be commercial — if you are unsure, ask us.
How licence verification works
Licensed features are unlocked by a signed licence file placed on your own machine, which the software verifies locally against a public key it ships with. Verification is offline: your installation does not contact us to run. That design is deliberate. It keeps installations working on air-gapped and restricted networks, and it means running Ligand-X discloses nothing about your work to us. Do not share your licence file — it is issued to you and its terms bind you.
Third-party scientific components
Ligand-X builds on open scientific software, which remains under its own licences and copyright. Those licences continue to apply to those components, and nothing in a Ligand-X licence overrides them. The principal ones: AutoDock Vina (Apache-2.0) — molecular docking OpenMM (LGPL-3.0-or-later) — molecular dynamics RDKit (BSD-3-Clause) — cheminformatics Open Force Field toolkit (MIT; force-field data CC-BY-4.0) — parameterisation OpenFE, gufe, kartograf (MIT) — binding free energy MDAnalysis and MDTraj (LGPL) — trajectory analysis PLIP (GPL-2.0) and ProLIF (Apache-2.0) — interaction profiling fpocket and p2rank (MIT) — binding-site detection Open Babel (GPL-2.0) — chemical file conversion PyMOL open source (Schrödinger open-source licence) and Mol* (MIT) — visualisation Ketcher (Apache-2.0) — structure editing PyTorch (BSD-3-Clause), Boltz-2 (MIT), ADMET-AI (MIT), REINVENT4 (Apache-2.0) — model-based Pro modules PySCF (Apache-2.0), xtb (LGPL-3.0), ASH (GPL-2.0), AmberTools (GPL-3.0 and others) — quantum chemistry and QM/MM NVIDIA CUDA runtime, cuDNN, and related GPU libraries (NVIDIA terms) — GPU-accelerated modules A complete component-by-component list, including transitive dependencies, ships inside each image as /app/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and with the launcher as a GitHub release asset. It can be regenerated from any released image. Some of these components are licensed under the GNU GPL or LGPL. As required by those licences, Ligand-X Inc. will supply the complete corresponding source code for them to any recipient of an image containing them, for three years from the date of distribution. Write to support@ligand-x.com. We redistribute them unmodified. NVIDIA components remain under NVIDIA's licence agreements. Ligand-X does not sublicense them except as those agreements allow.
Software you supply yourself
Two scientific engines are not redistributed with Ligand-X, because their own licences do not permit it. Ligand-X integrates with them; you license and install them yourself, and Ligand-X mounts them from a path you provide. ORCA (FAccTs GmbH) — quantum chemistry. Free for academic use under FAccTs' terms; commercial use requires a licence from FAccTs. NAMD (University of Illinois) — optional, used only for kinetics pre-seeding. Free for academic, research and internal business use; commercial use requires a licence from Illinois. Without it, kinetics uses RAMD pre-seeding instead, which needs nothing external. Where a module you are licensing depends on software you have to supply, we will tell you before you buy, not after.
Requesting a licence
Academic and commercial licences are both requested through the licence request form. Tell us the modules you need, your deployment target, and your timeline, and we will come back with a scope.