Free open-source SQL full-text search engine

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Commercial licensing Sphinx is publicly distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. In cases when GPL version of Sphinx could not be used because of license restrictions, you could obtain another, “commercial” license from us. Usually commercial license would be required if you need to embed Sphinx in your application (or redistribute Sphinx along with it), but do not want to to disclose your source code as required by GPL. This is similar to MySQL licensing model, so the rule of the thumb would be “if MySQL needs to be licensed, Sphinx needs to be licensed too.” One important case when commercial license is not required is when you use Sphinx on your Web site. Even if you (for example) provide paid search services to your end users, you still do not need a commercial license. This is because no redistribution of Sphinx code is actually happening, and GPL does not oblige you to do anything. Final licensing price would depend on the application character, licensing volume, retail price, royalty policy, amount of required technical support, etc. Guideline price for small-volume (5-20 copies) royalty-free licensing is $100/copy. Please send your licensing requests through the Contact Form.