No. It is source-available under the Elastic License 2.0, which is not an OSI-approved open source licence. You may use it inside your company at any scale, embed it in a product you sell, modify it and fork it. You may not offer it to third parties as a hosted or managed service.

Does running pmcp as an MCP server count as a hosted service?

No. A host process spawning it on your own machine is use, which is what the software is for. The prohibited case is a remotely hosted endpoint that serves other people.

Licence

Elastic License 2.0. Licensor: modootoday. This page is a summary; the licence itself is what governs.

What it permits

Using it inside your own company, on any scale.
Embedding it in a product you sell.
Modifying it, forking it, redistributing it with the notices intact.
Running it locally as an MCP server, which is what it is for. A host process spawning it on your own machine is use.

What it does not

Offering this software to third parties as a hosted or managed service. A remotely hosted MCP endpoint serving other people is the case this forbids.
Circumventing licence key functionality.
Removing or obscuring the notices.

This is not an OSI open source licence

Source-available and open source are not the same thing, and calling this one open source would be wrong. Plenty of organisations have a policy that allows only OSI-approved licences; if yours is one of them, that rules this out, and the honest time to find out is now rather than at review.

Patents

The licence carries an explicit patent grant and a retaliation clause: asserting patent claims that this software infringes ends your patent licence immediately. Permissive licences like MIT and BSD-3-Clause contain no patent text at all.

What ships with it

The two runtime dependencies, @modelcontextprotocol/server and zod, are MIT and are distributed under their own terms. @huggingface/transformers is an optional peer, never distributed with this package: a user who wants semantic ranking installs it themselves, under its own terms.

The text is what applies. Where this summary and the LICENSE file differ, LICENSE is what governs. NOTICE in the package says the same thing in short.