Because of its strong relationship to informatics, this program belongs more to the category cheminformatics than to molecular modelling.

It is available for Windows, Unix and other operating systems supporting the programming language Java.

It is free and open-source software distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0.

JOELib and OpenBabel were derived from the OELib Cheminformatics library.

The project logo is just the word JOELib in the Tengwar script of J. R. R. Tolkien.