We are considering using a subset and derivative of the Spamassasin rules in a commercial product (WatchGuard's WFS-Spamscreen). My understanding of the license is that we need to attribute the rules we use to the Spamassasin development team in our product, and its literature. Is this correct? Thank you in advance.
The SA rules are under the same license as SA itself. It is a dual license of the Perl Artistic license and the GNU GPL. (ie: you can pick either license to follow).
Both of these licenses have a variety of options to satisfy them, speak with your corporate lawyer for an accurate interpretation.
Under a pure layman's interpretation the GPL option should be satisfied if you use the rules in raw text format and don't convert them to any binary format and compile it in to your source code, and include a copy of the GPL license with the product. (ie: the GPL allows you to distribute modified works, provided that you don't strip the original license and that the entire modified work has the same rights of distribution the GPL offers. The GPL tends to define a "work" in terms of linkage, so the rule files should be a separate entity than the program that reads them, provided the program does so at run-time and not compile-time.) This would force your modified ruleset to be open source, but your program that reads them would not necessarily have to be Open Source.
The artistic license is just strange and screwy IMO, but you can probably get away with a lot more than on the GPL half. I can't intelligently comment on it, as it's creative clauses confuse even the best lawyers.
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