About RapidPro

Origins

RapidPro was originally built by a small team of developers at Nyaruka in Kigali, Rwanda. It was originally launched as the TextIt service which lives on today and which provides RapidPro as a hosted service.

TextIt was built from the experience that Nyaruka gained from building many RapidSMS systems for various clients. That experience informed their decision to build a system that was quick to deploy and which allowed for rapid experimentations of various interventions.

RapidPro Open Sourcing

In late 2014, Nyaruka partnered with UNICEF to expand on the capabilities of TextIt and release the source code as RapidPro under the Affero GPL (AGPL) license.

In brief, the Affero license states you can use the RapidPro source for any project free of charge, but that any changes you make to the source code must be available to others. Note that unlike the GPL, the AGPL requires these changes to be made public even if you do not redistribute them. If you host a version of RapidPro, you must make the same source you are hosting available for others.

RapidPro has dual copyright holders of UNICEF and Nyaruka.

Temba

You’ll notice that the main packages in RapidPro are named temba. Temba means “Flow” in Kinyarwanda and it is thus an homage to RapidPro’s roots in Kigali, Rwanda where it was first developed.

Commercial Licensing

If you wish to license portions of RapidPro under a different license, you may contact Nyaruka to discuss options.