Clayton Blake

How a company earns a living with no licence fee, and why he believes AI has levelled the field for open source.

Part of the OpenEyes Conference interview series, recorded on 16 September 2026 in Cardiff, UK.

Developing and Sustaining OpenEyes: Delivery Without a Licence Fee

We get our funding through support and installation and training. There's no licence fee. So I think it also keeps us honest as a company: if we're not at the top of our game, then another company can come in and take over.

About Clayton Blake

Clayton Blake is a Director of Toucan Labs, the main developer and technical custodian of OpenEyes under Apperta's governance. The company has delivered national systems in the UK and Australia.

Interview summary

Toucan Labs came to health sideways. A long-standing open source supplier, it had delivered national systems in the UK and Australia, and demonstrated what it thought the future of UK health IT looked like. Moorfields attended that demonstration, and the conversation started there. His reason for using open source is commercial rather than ideological: deploying national systems in two countries, it removed the barriers around intellectual property and deployment. On the common objection that open source exposes a product's flaws, he argues the opposite: a known issue gets fixed quickly.

On what makes this different from other open source work, he is unambiguous about who is in charge. The company does not design or dictate the product; the clinical community does, and it implements their wishes. He calls the product the baby of the clinical community and the patients, and frames the work accordingly: not an IT transformation but a clinical one, with the technology almost a byproduct.

On the commercial model: there is no licence fee, and revenue comes from support, installation and training. He describes the absence of guaranteed tenure as a discipline rather than a risk. Customers who realise there is no lock-in see the barriers fall. He notes that some buyers say that without a licence fee they are not interested, because they cannot pin responsibility on a company. The clearest articulation he offers is Wales's own: with one option "I'm buying a product", with the other "I'm actually joining a community and forming a partnership".

On artificial intelligence, he argues that intellectual property is becoming less of a moat, because anyone can pick up a product and clone it regardless - so buyers look past the product to the history of the company, its people and the community around it. On barriers he is clear they are never clinical: the obstacle is the route to funding, where a lead time to purchase can run to three years against implementations of a few weeks.