CARLOS (Clinical Assisting Recording Ledger Open Source) is an electronic medical records system forked from the OpenO EMR project. This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2. The CARLOS contributors and the many others involved with development of this codebase believe strongly in the value of open-source software in healthcare. This license means:
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Freedom to Modify and Distribute: You are free to modify and distribute the software, but any modifications or derived works must also be licensed under GPL v2. This ensures that the software remains open-source, and any improvements are shared back with the community.
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Source Code Availability: If you distribute any modified versions or binaries, you must also provide access to the corresponding source code. This helps maintain transparency and allows other users to build on your changes.
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No Warranty or Liability: As with all GPL-licensed software, CARLOS comes with no warranty, either express or implied. The software is provided "as is," meaning that CARLOS contributors and any others involved are not liable for any issues, damages, or legal claims arising from the use of the software. Users are responsible for ensuring compliance with relevant laws and regulations in their jurisdiction when using or distributing the software.
Please review the GPL v2 license for further details. CARLOS EMR continues to evolve through community-driven development, providing a robust solution tailored for modern healthcare challenges.
Running CARLOS on a server — install the Debian packages. Every
release ships carlos-emr
and carlos-emr-drugref .deb files (with checksums and provenance
attestations) that set up the whole system on one Ubuntu 26.04 machine: the
application, MariaDB, an nginx + ModSecurity web application firewall, HTTPS,
scheduled encrypted backups, and the carlos-ctl administration tool — with
every long-running component under an unprivileged account.
sudo apt install ./carlos-emr_<version>_all.deb ./carlos-emr-drugref_<version>_all.deb
sudo carlos-ctl checkFull install and quickstart guide: docs/install-deb.md.
Developing CARLOS — use the devcontainer, a complete disposable development environment with synthetic data. It is for development only, never for patient information.
Containers (under development) — the carlos-podman project deploys CARLOS as rootless Podman pods with an optional observability stack and Ansible provisioning; see its README and QUICKSTART.
Published source archives, versioned WAR files, checksums, and SBOMs are available on the GitHub Releases page. Signed provenance attestations are verifiable as described in the release process. Alpha, beta, and release-candidate builds are prereleases and should be evaluated before production deployment.
CARLOS follows a CalVer maintenance-branch model. Maintainers and contributors should follow the canonical release process for versioning, target-branch selection, tags, hotfixes, and release verification.
In brief, normal work starts from and targets develop; high-priority fixes for
supported releases start from and target the oldest affected release/YYYY.MM
branch before they are forward-merged; and release-preparation PRs promote
current-train exact versions to main. Older supported patches remain on their
maintenance branch. Ongoing branches use
-SNAPSHOT with SCM tag HEAD. Release tags are annotated, immutable, and
created only on exact non-snapshot release commits.
We welcome community involvement! Whether you're reporting bugs, improving documentation, or writing code, your contributions help build a better EMR for healthcare providers.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for everything you need to get started, including development environment setup, code standards, and the pull request process.
CARLOS is forked from the OpenO EMR project, which itself was forked from OSCAR McMaster.
Important Disclaimers:
- This project has no affiliation with OpenOSP, the organization that developed OpenO EMR
- This project has no affiliation with McMaster University
- OSCAR is an official mark of McMaster University
- The OSCAR name is used in this project solely for descriptive and historical purposes
For detailed copyright attribution and project heritage information, see NOTICE.md.
CARLOS is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2, providing transparency and freedom for users to modify and improve the software. See the LICENSE file for full details.