SpatiaLite is an open source library intended to extend basic SQLite core in order to support full fledged Spatial SQL capabilities.
SQLite is intrinsically simple and lighweight:

• a single ligthweight library implementing the full SQL engine
• standard SQL implementation: almost complete SQL-92
• no complex client/server architecture
• a whole database simply corresponds to a single monolithic file (no size limits)
• any DB-file can be safely exchanged across different platforms, because the internal architecture is universally portable
• no installation, no configuration

SpatiaLite is smoothly integrated into SQLite so to deploy a complete and powerfull Spatial DBMS (mostly OGC-SFS compliant).
Using SQLite + SpatiaLite you can effectively deploy an alternative open source Spatial DBMS roughly equivalent to PostgreSQL + PostGIS.

SpatiaLite is licensed under the MPL tri-license terms; you are free to choose the best-fit license between:

• the MPL 1.1
• the GPL v2.0 or any subsequent version
• the LGPL v2.1 or any subsequent version