The Legal Case Management system (LCM) is distributed as “Free Software”, in the sense that it is considered important that our users do not create a dependancy and loose their freedom when using the software.

Organisations who install LCM create a dependancy towards the software as they use it daily as a tool to support their activities. It is therefore important that they will always have the right to use the software for any purpose (there is no license that expires, or that is limited to a certain number of staff). They may also need to modify the software for their requirements, either by asking in-house staff, university students or consultants. It may be as trivial as changing a string in the software or adding a small data validation function to verify the value of a specific field.

According to the Free Software Definition:

Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

 The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
 The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
 The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
 The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

In other words, the license used to redistribute LCM does not remove rights from the users, but instead guarantees them.

LCM is redistributed using the GNU General Public License:

(C) 2004-2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA

For more information, see the full text of the GNU GPL license.