The Commercial License is an agreement with SENTENSA for organizations that do not want to release their application source code. Commercially licensed customers get a commercially supported product with assurances from SENTENSA and support services. Commercially licensed users are also free from the requirement of making their own application open source.

When your application is not licensed under either the GPL-compatible Free Software License as defined by the Free Software Foundation or approved by OSI, and you intend to or you may distribute SENTENSA software, you must first obtain a commercial license to the SENTENSA product.

• Selling software that includes SENTENSA products to customers who install the software on their own machines without adhering to GPL/LGPL.
• Selling software that requires customers to install SENTENSA products themselves on their own machines.
• Building a hardware system that includes SENTENSA products and selling that hardware system to customers for installation at their own locations.

• If you include the SENTENSA Knowledge Miner with an application that is not licensed under the GPL or GPL-compatible license, you need a commercial license for the SENTENSA Knowledge Miner (however, if you license software that is non-GPL/LGPL compatible (non-free programs) and only use the Indexing part of SENTENSA Knowledge Miner in such a way that you link to the Indexing part from the non-free program you may in some cases use the SENTENSA LGPL, for more information please refer to the LGPL formal terms).
• If you develop and distribute a commercial application and as part of utilizing your application, the end-user must download a copy of SENTENSA Knowledge Miner; for each derivative work, you (or, in some cases, your end-user) need a commercial license from SENTENSA.
• If you distribute SENTENSA software within your organization, you should purchase a commercial license.
• GPL/LGPL users have no direct legal relationship with SENTENSA. The commercial license, on the other hand, is SENTENSA's private license, and provides a direct legal relationship with SENTENSA.

[With a commercial non-GPL SENTENSA license, one license is required per database server (single installed SENTENSA binary). There are no restrictions on the number of connections, number of CPUs, memory or disks to that one SENTENSA database server. The SENTENSA server is licensed per CPU or named user.]

1. Non-Profits, Academic Institutions, and Private Individuals

If you represent a non-profit organization or an academic institution, we recommend you publish your application as an open source / free software project using the GPL/LGPL. Thereby, you are free to use SENTENSA software free of charge under the GPL/LGPL. We believe that if you have strong reasons to not publish your application in accordance with the GPL/LGPL, you should purchase commercial licenses.

If you are a private individual you are free to use SENTENSA software for your personal applications as long as you do not distribute them. If you distribute them, you must make a decision between the Commercial License and the GPL/LGPL.

Please note that even if you ship a free demo version of your own application, the above rules apply.

2. Recommendations

Please note that SENTENSA can only give advice on which license is right for you. The final judgment, of course can be made only by a court of law. With that said, we recommend the commercial license to all commercial and government organizations. This frees you from the broad and strict requirements of open source licenses such as GPL and LGPL.

To anyone in doubt, we recommend the commercial license. It is never wrong. Thanks to our cost-effective way of producing software, we are able to sell our commercial licenses at prices well under the industry average.

3. License Agreement

For more information about the commercial license agreement terms, click here.