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CLAM is offered under the GNU General Public License
(GPL).
You may get a complete copy of the
license by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1308 USA or
at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.
The following, though, is a brief
summary of what this license means. Nevertheless, that does
not imply the Free Software Foundation agrees with the exact
words that are in this website. For legal interpretations
you might as well contact FSF yourself.(http://fsfeurope.org)
The GPL is the most often used license
for Free Software, with over 50% of all Free Software being
licensed under it. For a piece of software to classify as
Free Software, it must grant the user the freedom to use,
modify, study, and distribute it. "Copyleft" protects this
rights by requiring that the result of using Free Software
is also Free. GPL is a particular version of the Copyleft
endorsed by the GNU project and FSF.
All the above means, to put it short,
that you can do whatever you want with CLAM
as long as the resulting software is also licensed under
the GPL.(In-house or personal modifications to CLAM,
though are not forced to become public).
Note: an important feature of free
software is that the source code must be open so it can
effectively be modified. Open Source, though, has nowadays
become something different and an open source project does
not necessarily imply Free Software.
The Copyleft is there to protect
the user's freedom but also the author's rights. No one
will be able to make a "propietary" (opposite to Free) software
without his consent. (One can sell and distribute the product
and make money from that activity as long as it does not
violate the GPL license).
So, what if you want to build a "propietary"
piece of software and you want to use CLAM?
Can you just do that? The answer is no, but... But if you
talk to us we can possibly come to an agreement and offer
you a non-GPL license for using CLAM. Note
though that this double-licensing scheme can only be used
by the authors themselves and cannot be enforced by a third
party.
Anyway, if you have any doubt about the license, please
send a mail to clam-info@iua.upf.es.
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