I'm working for a company that stores millions of newspapers articles. Subscribers can log on our site and make queries. Our search engine returns articles that match the queries.
I know that in general, a company can use GPL Stanford software commercially as long as all their source code is available and the GPL is preserved in their distribution. The case here is that we dot not distribute any code binaries to clients. Clients only log in, make queries and get results. In this particular case, can we use Stanford NER free of charge or do we have to purchase a commercial license?
You should seek professional legal council on this, rather than trusting answers on stackoverflow. My impression however is that yes, so long as you're behind a website and not distributing the source code, Stanford CoreNLP is legal to use. Of course, we always appreciate it if buy a license -- it goes to buying us poor grad students things like new chairs and computers :).