Business use of Community Edition

MBA_Data_Miner

Hi,

I am a relatively new Rapidminer user. I was wondering if the 5.3 Community Edition is usable by a business for internal business purposes? (the results of analysis would not be used outside of the business). My understanding is that RM 5.3 community is licensed under AGPL v.3, but the part about integration confuses me. I am an analyst for a higher education institution. We would like to use RM community to build some models built on spreadsheet data.

To clarify RM would be used on spreadsheets, text files, and access databases without being integrated directly with any enterprise systems.

I have looked through past blog posts to try and find a clear answer.

Can anyone from RM provide me with guidance?

Also do Higher Education analysts quality for the RM 6 Academic program? ( for institutional research, not published academic research)

Please advise and many thanks,

J.

MBA_Data_Miner

If anyone from RM can clarify, I would greatly appreciate it. The closest answer to my question below I can find is a post from Sebastian Land in  February 2012. It seems to be ok but I want to be sure. My organization is new to predictive modeling/data mining, so I am one of the only people researching/promoting it out of several thousand employees. I have no software budget. RM community edition would be a great solution for us until more funding is approved. Anyone from RM is also welcome to contact me through my registration e-mail account as well.



Best Regards,

J.

MBA_Data_Miner wrote:

Hi, I am a relatively new Rapidminer user. I was wondering if the 5.3 Community Edition is usable by a business for internal business purposes? (the results of analysis would not be used outside of the business). My understanding is that RM 5.3 community is licensed under AGPL v.3, but the part about integration confuses me. I am an analyst for a higher education institution. We would like to use RM community to build some models built on spreadsheet data. To clarify RM would be used on spreadsheets, text files, and access databases without being integrated directly with any enterprise systems. I have looked through past blog posts to try and find a clear answer. Can anyone from RM provide me with guidance? Also do Higher Education analysts quality for the RM 6 Academic program? ( for institutional research, not published academic research) Please advise and many thanks, J.

Marco_Boeck

Hi,

if you don't integrate RM 5.3 directly into any other system, you are free to use it.
Regarding Studio 6, I don't think you fall under the criteria for RapidMiner Academia as you're not doing academic research.

Regards,
Marco

lthieme

Hello Marco Boeck,
could you please clarify what is meant by "if you don't integrate RM 5.3 directly into any other system, you are free to use it."?
In my opinion this is a very fuzzy definition - e.g. a data center where a compute server is running RM 5.3 might be a system too...

Furthermore, could you please give me a valid reference to the license conditions where I could find this statement?

Thanks in advance & regards,
lthieme

Marco_Boeck

Hi,

RapidMiner 5.3 is licensed under the standard AGPL v3 license. A copy of that exact license is shipped with Rapidminer 5.3.

A quick and simple example:
Fine: You use RapidMiner 5.3 in GUI mode and create results which you export to Excel to further work with them.
Prohibited: You use RapidMiner 5.3 in command line mode and create results which you automatically feed to a different application for further processing. Exception: All programs part of that workflow (including scripts) are also freely available under AGPL v3 or you have purchased an OEM license for RapidMiner 5.

For all the gritty details (and murky waters and uncharted territory and so on) about the AGPL v3, please consult your copyright lawyer.

Regards,
Marco