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Open Source Versus Commercial Licenses for the gSOAP Software

The gSOAP 2.7.x and 2.8.x releases are distributed under:
  1. GPL v2 (GNU Public License 2.0):

    If you use gSOAP under the GPL v2 to integrate parts of it or code generated by it with your own code, then you are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only under the terms of the GNU GPL v2. Thus, you must make the source code of your programs available to the users of your program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL. These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered code you received in a program of your own.

    For more information on the GNU Public License 2.0, please visit: GPL v2 FAQ

    Please check the suitability of GPL v2 for your project. Requirements imposed by the GPL v2 may affect the release of your software, as explained further below in "gSOAP and the GPL".

    If you do not wish to use gSOAP under the GPL v2, then we recommend to obtain a commercial license for the commercial edition of gSOAP available for purchase from Genivia Inc.

  2. A standard edition commercial-use license can be purchased for commercial product development. This license does not impose the GPL v2 open source licensing terms, conditions, and limitations. Also an enterprise license is available for purchase.

  3. Some older parts of the software are also covered by the gSOAP Public License 1.3 (which is based on the Mozilla public license 1.1). Please be aware that the following software components are NOT covered by this older gSOAP Public License and requires a commercial license or are GPL v2 open source by default:
    • the wsdl2h tool and its source code output,
    • the soapcpp2 tool and its source code output,
    • UDDI code,
    • the webserver example code in gsoap/samples/webserver,
    • and several example applications in the gsoap/samples directory.

gSOAP and the GPL

If you use gSOAP under the GPL v2 to integrate parts of it or code generated by it with your own code, then you are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only under the terms of the GNU GPL v2. Thus, for instance, you must make the source code available to the users of the program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL. These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered code you received in a program of your own. These restrictions may hamper certain proprietary software development scenarios. If you do not wish for your program to be released under a GPL-compatible open source license, then an alternate proprietary software license for gSOAP which will remove the aforementioned requirement is available from Genivia Inc.

The gSOAP software does not include any third-party GPL code. All software was build from the ground up. Note that the GNU Bison and Flex tools are used to generate source code for the gSOAP soapcpp2 compiler. However, the Bison/Flex-generated source code is not restricted by the GPL or LGPL terms.

Non-GPL third-party contributions are included in the 'extras' directory in the package and you are free to use these contributions. Suggested changes and improvements by vendors were accepted under the public gSOAP license (not GPL), which includes support for VxWorks and Apache and IIS modules for gSOAP.

Do you have questions? Please contact me by email at: engelen AT acm DOT org.