License Agreement

Important Note: BioInfoRx reserves the right to make changes to the BxAF License Agreement at all times under all conditions. The License Agreement you should follow is the one you agree when you apply for the BxAF license key. Please print and save this License Agreement as proof for future reference.

BioInfoRx has two licensing options for its product BxAF and all modules developed based on BxAF. No matter which license you choose, the overall business benefit of the BxAF System is a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. From a licensing perspective, we have two different products depending on usage and distribution, though technically they have the same source code.

Every one can test BxAF and related modules under the GPL license and inspect the source code before purchasing a commercial non-GPL license. If GPL license does not apply, the free testing period is limited to one month after the application of BxAF license key.

Our licensing options include:

The Commercial License, which allows you to develop BxAF-based in-house system in commercial environment, provide commercial software licenses to your customers or distribute BxAF-based custom-developed applications. This is for for-profit organizations that want to develop BxAF-based in-house or commercial systems. Please contact BioInfoRx (http://www.bioinforx.com) for the price quote of the commercial license.
For those nonprofit organizations developing open source applications, the Open Source License allows you to offer your software under an open source / free software license to all who wish to use, modify, and distribute it freely. The Open Source License allows you to use the software at no charge under the condition that if you use whole or part of BxAF in an application you redistribute, the complete source code for your application must be available and freely redistributable under reasonable conditions. BioInfoRx bases its interpretation of the GPL on the Free Software Foundation's Frequently Asked Questions (http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html).

In their simplest form, the following are general licensing guidelines:

If you are in a nonprofit organization and your software is licensed under either the GPL-compatible Free Software License as defined by the Free Software Foundation or approved by OSI, then use our GPL licensed version.
If you affiliate wtih a for-profit organization, distribute a proprietary application in any way, or you are not licensing and distributing your source code under GPL, you need to purchase a commercial license of BxAF
If you are unsure, we recommend that you buy our cost effective commercial licenses. That is the safest solution. You can send your licensing questions to us (see our contact information at http://bioinforx.com/) directly. Also, we encourage you to refer to the Free Software Foundation or a lawyer as appropriate.

BxAF Commercial License

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

When you are affiliated with a for-profit organization, or 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 BxAF-based software system, you must first obtain a commercial license to the BxAF product.

For OEM's, ISVs, corporate, and government users, a commercial license is the proper solution because it provides you with assurance from the vendor and releases you from the strict requirements of the GPL license.

Typical examples of BxAF distribution include:

Selling software that includes BxAF, partially or entirely, to customers who install the software on their own machines.
Selling software that requires customers to install BxAF themselves on their own machines.
Building a hardware system that includes BxAF, partially or entirely, and selling that hardware system to customers for installation at their own locations.

Specifically:

If you are affiliated with a for-profit organization, you need a commercial license for BxAF.
If you include the BxAF, partially or entirely, with an application that is not licensed under the GPL or GPL-compatible license, you need a commercial license for BxAF.
If you develop and distribute a commercial application and as part of utilizing your application, the end-user must download a copy of BxAF; for each derivative work, you (or, in some cases, your end-user) need a commercial license for BxAF.
If you include one or more of the BxAF module in your non-GPL application (so that your application can run with BxAF), you need a commercial license for BxAF.
GPL users have no direct legal relationship with BioInfoRx. The commercial license, on the other hand, is BioInfoRx's private license, and provides a direct legal relationship with BioInfoRx.

With a commercial non-GPL BxAF license, one license is required per system (single installed BxAF system). There are no restrictions on the number of connections, number of CPUs, memory or disks to the computers that BxAF system is installed on.

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 license. In this manner, you are free to use BxAF software free of charge under the GPL license. We believe that if you have strong reasons to not publish your application in accordance with the GPL, you should purchase commercial licenses. Note that non-profits may apply to BxAF for free commercial licenses and such applications will be carefully considered.

If you are a private individual you are free to use BxAF 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.

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

Recommendations

Please note that BioInfoRx 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 the GPL license.

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.

BxAF Open Source License

Our software is 100% GPL (General Public License); if you are affiliated with a nonprofit organization and your products are 100% GPL compliant, then you have no obligation to pay us for the licenses. This is a great opportunity for the open source community and those of you who are developing open source software.

The formal terms of the GPL license can be found in the GNU General Public License (a copy of attached at end of this document). Please note that the General Public License can be restrictive, so if it doesn't meet your needs, you are better served by our Commercial License.

Specifically:

You must not be affiliated with for-profit organizations where BxAF is used.
BxAF is free use for those who are 100% GPL and not affiliated with for-profit organizations. If your application is licensed under GPL or compatible OSI license approved by BioInfoRx, you are free to ship any GPL software of BxAF with your application ('application' means any type of software application, system, tool or utility). You do not need a separate signed agreement with BioInfoRx, because the GPL license is sufficient. We do, however, recommend you contact us as there usually are good opportunities for partnership and co-marketing.
Under the Open Source License, you must release the complete source code for the application that is built on BxAF. You do not need to release the source code for components that are generally installed on the operating system on which your application runs, such as system header files or libraries.
Free use for those who never copy, modify or distribute. As long as you never distribute the BxAF Software in any way, you are free to use it for powering your application, irrespective of whether your application is under GPL license or not.
You are allowed to modify BxAF Software source code any way you like as long as the distributed derivative work is licensed under the GPL as well.
You are allowed to copy BxAF source code, but when you do so, the copies will fall under the GPL license.

GNU General Public License

Version 2, June 1991

  Copyright © 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA
  Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
  of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Preamble

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software---to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.

Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations.

Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The ``Program'', below, refers to any such program or work, and a ``work based on the Program'' means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term ``modification''.) Each licensee is addressed as ``you''.

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.

You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.

In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.

You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third-party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.

You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances.

It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice.

This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License.

If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.
The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.

Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and ``any later version'', you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.

NO WARRANTY

BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM ``AS IS'' WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS