KNIME

KNIME Open Source License Model in a Nutshell:

We consider KNIME to be a research and teaching platform and want it to be used in this environment as much as possible. Therefore the license aims to make non-profit usage, non-profit distribution and internal use (even for commercial purposes) free. However, you may not distribute KNIME for a profit without our permission, as explained in the Aladdin Free Public License and below. We decided against using the well known GPL license for two reasons. Firstly, KNIME is an environment that is modular and therefore external contributions will mainly result in additional nodes - where insights into the core code are useful but changes/extensions to the core are not required. We envision most external contributions to be related to new nodes. We provide source code of the KNIME core for this reason but we would like to ask that you do not change the core without contacting us (although you are allowed to change it under the current license). Secondly, since the core of KNIME is crucial for all other pieces to work smoothly we would like to keep control over future developments. People who are interested in contributing to the KNIME core development are encouraged to contact us, of course. If you have written a new node that you believe is interesting to others, please let us know and we would be happy to point to your site or include it in our list of external contributions/extensions. We are very interested in getting input both with ideas and actual contributions and we hope to be able to offer KNIME stipends in the future from income through the second, commercial license of KNIME (see below).

So, what about commercial use of KNIME? Well, we believe that if someone does make money from distributing KNIME, KNIME should benefit from it. So we do offer licensing models for commerical resellers and sublicensors that help us further develop the core and continue to add modules. Commercial licensing schemes can, for example, involve making code contributions or royalty payments that enable us to hire programmers or fund KNIME stipends. Note that using KNIME for your own, internal data analysis work is free under the current license, even if such internal data analysis work is used to generate profit for yourself or the company (so long as the source of profit is not the distribution of KNIME or the sale of services or other products bundled with KNIME, as explained in the Aladdin Free Public License).