The QALL-ME Framework, its documentation and its demo component implementations are free open source software products which are released under the terms of the Apache License 2.0 (henceforth abbreviated as “AL2”). This does not encompass third-party software which is used in the distributed framework implementations. We have made sure, though, that the dependencies of the core framework are all available under licenses which are AL2 compatible. Some particular demo component implementations, however, are using third-party libraries with more restrictive licenses; nontheless, our implementations themselves, i.e., our implementations seen in isolation from third-party software, are still AL2 licensed.

For example, the demo component implementation of the German EntailmentTester web service (see also section 4.2.3.4) depends on the SimMetrics library which is available under the terms of the GNU GPL version 2 or later. As the GNU GPL in version 3 (GPLv3) is compatible with the AL2^[11], using this library within the demo components is possible. This means that the EntailmentTester demo implementation for German is implicitly licensed under the GPLv3, too, and any derivative work of this EntailmentTester demo implementation which also uses the SimMetrics library has to be licensed under a GPLv3 (and AL2) compatible license.

For information on the concrete license terms of all used third-party software, have a look at the NOTICE file in the software packages that are distributed for the QALL-ME Framework (cf. 4.1: “Download Packages Overview”): this file should provide or point you to all relevant information on the concrete licensing of libraries that are used in the framework.

Please also see our “Acknowledgements” section for other free resources that we use in conjunction with the QALL-ME Framework.