Modding WordPress for a University project

Hi guys. I would like to start by congratulating you for this wonderful piece of art. Your blogging software works excellent and looks superb. Keep up the great work.

Recently the teacher in charge of the Investigation Groups on my university has asked me to implement some blogs so that our Investigation Groups may have a space where to share all their projects and updates. After making some research I concluded that WordPress is the most suitable blog for our needs.

Sadly, since my university is at Colombia, and thus, spanish speaking, so I would need to localize it (so that end users won’t have to worry about the interface -despite english being a requirement for every student, not everyone here is very adept on the language-) and probably modify some of its code (not much, actually) so that it can comply with some requirements of our IT department. Of course the end result would still have the “powered by WordPress” requirement and credit WordPress as always (I would only credit myself and my workgroup where it’s needed).

Anyways, my questions are:

– How much am I allowed to modify from the software?
(I don’t think there is any problems here, since my problems are only localizing it and making a good template for it)

– Would WordPress charge my university for using the (modded or not) software? (note that the end result is only for educational and institutional use, never for commercial use)

– Am I allowed to mod WordPress so that it can work on Oracle? (This is because my university only supports Oracle, and trying to install MySQL might get me some unwanted problems with the IT department. I dunno if there already is a mod allowing it to do so)

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
sagematt