cole is Free Software, which means is distributed under a license that protect your freedom. cole distribution license is compatible with the Open Source definition.
cole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). A copy of the license is in the file COPYING in the source code and in this document. Particulary, this means at least two things:
All the code statically or dinamically linked against cole must be distributed under the terms of a license compatible with GPL.
If you change the cole source code and you want to distribute a compiled version, you must release the changed cole source code too.