The ePostRx Commercial License is a direct agreement with ANSHealth for organizations that do not want to release their application source code. Commercially licensed customers get a commercially supported product with assurances from ANSHealth without the requirement that their ePostRx-based software must be "open sourced". ANSHealth is able to provide a commercial license because it has full ownership of the ePostRx code.

When your application is not licensed under either the GPL-compatible Free Software License as defined by the Free Software Foundation or approved by OSI, and you intend to or you may redistribute ePostRx software, you must first obtain a commercial license to the ePostRx product.

Typical examples of ePostRx distribution include:

• Selling software that includes ePostRx to customers who install the software on their own machines.
• Selling software that requires customers to install ePostRx themselves on their own machines.
• Building a hardware system that includes ePostRx and selling that hardware system to customers for installation at their own locations.

Specifically:

• If you include the ePostRx application with another application that is not licensed under the GPL or GPL-compatible license, you need a commercial license for the ePostRx application.
• If you develop and distribute a commercial application and as part of utilizing your application, the end-user must download a copy of ePostRx; for each derivative work, you (or, in some cases, your end-user) need a commercial license for the ePostRx application.
• GPL users have no direct legal relationship with ANSHealth. The commercial license, on the other hand, is ANSHealth's private license, and provides a direct legal relationship with ANSHealth.

Note: If your use of ePostRx does not require a commercial  license, but you like ePostRx and want to encourage further development, you are certainly welcome to purchase a license or ePostRx support. If you use ePostRx in a commercial context such that you profit by its use, we ask that you further the development of ePostRx by purchasing some level of support. We feel if ePostRx helps your pharmacy business, it's reasonable to ask that you help ePostRx.

Non-Profits, Academic Institutions, and Private Individuals

If you represent a non-profit organization or an academic institution, we recommend you publish your application as an open source / free software project using the GPL license. In this manner, you are free to use ePostRx software free of charge under the GPL license. We believe that if you have strong reasons to not publish your application in accordance with the GPL, you should purchase commercial licenses. Note that non-profits may apply to ePostRx for free commercial licenses and such applications will be carefully considered.

If you are a private individual you are free to use ePostRx software for your personal applications as long as you do not distribute them. If you distribute them, you must make a decision between the Commercial License and the GPL.

Please note that even if you ship a free demo version of your own application, the above rules apply.

Recommendations

Please note that ANSHealth can only give advice on which license is right for you. The final judgment, of course can be made only by a court of law. With that said, we recommend the commercial license to all commercial and government organizations. This frees you from the broad and strict requirements of the GPL license.

To all free software enthusiasts we recommend our products under the GPL license.

To anyone in doubt, we recommend the commercial license. It is never wrong. Thanks to our cost-effective way of producing software, we are able to sell our commercial licenses at prices well under the industry average.

IMPORTANT - Proprietary Vendor APIs

Although ePostRx is free and 100% GPL, there are a few vendor proprietary APIs and source code files (~10) that are not included in the final GPL software bundle. These files were intentionally omitted because of non-disclosure agreements currently enforced between ANSHealth and third party vendors who would not allow ANSHealth to bundle their associated code. These areas include:

1. Drug Database Interface (Medispan, First Databank...)
2. Interactive Voice Recognition (Telemanager,Ateb,Voice Tech...)
3. Auto Fulfillment (McKesson,ScriptPro,ProRata,AutoMed...)

If you wish to gain access to these files, you will need to purchase a commercial license so ANSHealth can enforce these agreements. However, ANSHealth would suggest that the community pressure those company's mentioned above to release their APIs/specifications to the ePostRx community for future GPL releases. ANSHealth believes most of  these APIs or specifications are just conduits to their actual Intellectual Property (data or hardware) and should be made available to the community. For example, it's not like we're asking them to make available the Drug Database data or specifications on the IVR or fulfillment hardware, just the APIs to access it!

Most of the support jars are included in the software bundle and are available for free and licensed under various Open Source licenses (GNU GPL, LGPL, Apache, BSD etc..). With exception to those proprietary vendors listed above, the other jars you will need to download to build ePostRx are the following:

1. Swiss Sql One API
2. Quartz Scheduler
3. Xfire(SOA)
4. IBatis(DAO)

Still confused?

If you have any questions about Licensing, please checkout our License FAQ or contact the ANSHealth Sales Team to explore the options available for your specific scenario.

OSI = Open Source Initiative, www.opensource.org/licenses
GPL = GNU General Public License, www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html