Licensing of qiime for commercial use

[Munmun Sarkar]

HI all

  I have a very basic question. I know qiime is open source and free to use. But I want to know about the licensing regarding use of qiime for commercial purpose. Please give me the information.

Thank you

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Munmun

[TonyWalters]

Hello Munmum,

QIIME itself uses a GPL license. Unfortunately, the answer isn't as simple as that-the underlying dependencies may have different licenses regarding commercial use (e.g. UCLUST/USEARCH) and even the reference databases may have commercial licenses that aren't free (e.g. SILVA). You would have to examine all of the underlying software to make sure that you are using software that is free for commercial use or get a license for it.

Some of the licenses are listed on this page, although you should dig into the exact language of the license for any given software that will be used:

http://qiime.org/install/install.html?highlight=license#installing-qiime-natively-with-a-full-install