Why dual licensing? Since we got a huge amount of requests for a proprietary license for RapidMiner (formerly YALE), we decided to develop RapidMiner according to a dual licensing model. In many cases users and developers embed RapidMiner as a core library into their application or improve RapidMiner for a customer by changing the graphical user interface, adding new operators, etc. Although it is possible to do this under the GPL under certain restrictions, some people demand for a proprietary license in order to fit their business model.

RapidMiner (formerly YALE) is available under two different license types: first, the open-source version of RapidMiner available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and a version available under a closed-source (commercial) license. Although we try to minimize the number of differences between both versions, there are some small exceptions which will be discussed here.