Cafu is available under two licenses:

• the GNU General Public License
• an individually tailored, commercial license

The source code is in both cases exactly the same, and it depends on your goals and requirements which of the two licenses is the most suitable for you.

Cafu is available to everyone as 100 percent free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

It can be obtained at the Downloads page and via the Subversion repository that can be checked out or browsed online.

If your software is 100 percent free software under the GPL as well, then you never have to pay us for the licenses. (In all other instances, you are better served by our commercial license.)

Please refer to the official GNU GPL website for a detailed explanation of the rights that the GPL grants you and the (very few) obligations that it can impose on you. There you also find the definition of free software, answers to frequently asked questions, and many other pieces of worthwhile information about the GPL.

The one thing that is not possible with Cafu code under the GPL is combining it with proprietary code and distributing the result publicly (private or company internal use is OK).

That is, you can not use the free Cafu source code in order to create a new program (e.g. a computer game) that is publicly sold (distributed) without releasing the full source code (including all of your previously closed, proprietary parts) under the GPL as well. Please consult the GPL itself and the GPL FAQs for details.

The solution is to get Cafu not under the GPL, but directly from CFS under a custom license that is tailored to your needs:

• Get free from the restrictions and compliance requirements of the GPL. Link in any code or libraries (including proprietary) that you need. Modify as your heart desires, combine and merge as much or as little as you want. And preserve the chance to sell that great new game by keeping the code for yourself.

• Let us know what works best for you: Do you prefer a one-time license fee? Or rather a percentage per sold copy? You can relate this to the number of developers in your team or the sales price of the items, or anything else you wish. As we usually do not know your company or your team and are unfamiliar with your business details, you can even suggest the height of the licensing fee that you're willing to pay – we're (not totally but) very flexible even here.

• We are not lawyers and we don't pretend to know the ins and outs of the international right, the right in your country or state, as well as the full details in ours. It is our goal to provide you with a simple, fair and correct license agreement that accounts both for your requirements as well as ours. We're happy to consider and include any special wish that you may come up with.

• wahlweise zusätzlicher Support

In summary: Just let us know that you want a custom license, and what you want the license to look like. Mention any detail that is important to you. We're looking forward to work out the details together with you!

Of course, Cafu uses only such external libraries that are legally compatible with closed-source use, that is, libraries that in turn do not impose GPL-like restrictions of their own. See file LICENSE.txt for details, or ask us if you have any questions!