Read it
The repository includes the complete technical documentation: architecture, design decisions recorded one by one, interface reference and deployment guide.
The code is open and so is the conversation
Orpyca is released under the AGPL-3.0 licence, the same licence family Orfeo was born under. You can read the code, audit it, copy it, modify it and deploy it without asking anyone’s permission.
For a public body this is not an ideological detail: it is the difference between being able to verify what the system does with your documents and having to take a supplier’s word for it.
The repository opens to the public with the release of this version.
Where it comes from
Orfeo was born in 2002 at the Colombian Superintendency of Public Utilities and released under the GPL. Since then dozens of institutions in Colombia and across Latin America adopted it, and a community sustained it for twenty years.
Orpyca acknowledges that debt. The list of people who worked on the original code is preserved in the repository, and the archival logic we inherited is the result of two decades of work by archivists and developers, most of whom were never paid for it.
How to take part
Report it
If you find a defect or behaviour that does not match the regulation, open an issue. A report from an archivist who knows the practice is worth more than ten design opinions.
Contribute
The repository’s contribution guide explains the workflow, the coding style and what is expected of a change proposal. Contributions are reviewed and merged under the same licence.
Tell us how it went
If you installed it yourself, knowing where you stumbled improves the documentation for whoever comes next. Write to us even if you are not going to hire us.
A note on scope
The repository does not include data-migration tooling for existing Orfeo installations, and it will not: every institution configured its own differently, and keeping that set of special cases in the core helps nobody else. What does live here is the generic importer, with its documented and stable package format. The translator from each source system is built outside, against that contract. Improvements to the importer itself — which number formats it accepts, how it reconciles numbering after a load — are welcome, because they benefit any source.
What the AGPL-3.0 means
You may use Orpyca for whatever you want, without paying and without asking permission, including modifying it deeply.
The obligation to publish your changes arises only if you distribute the modified system to third parties or offer it as a service to other institutions. Using it inside your own institution creates no obligation to publish anything.
It is the licence that stops someone taking this work, closing it and reselling it as their own product without giving anything back.
What is being worked on
The roadmap lives in the repository documentation and is updated with every advance. It also states what is missing, including what depends on infrastructure outside the institution, such as the accreditation of a certification authority.