Free Licenses of Jive Software for Open Source Projects and User Groups

Blogs Ignite Realtime Blogs
1

Jive Software has been providing free collaboration software to open source projects for a while, and we are now expanding this program to other software developer user groups (JUGs, etc.) We have also simplified the application making it easier for open source projects and user groups to get a free license.

The free license can be used with Clearspace, Clearspace X, and Jive Forums for use in open source projects and developer user groups. This is our way of supporting software developers working for non-commercial purposes. Collaboration is a critical part of most software development projects. Many developers devote time and energy to projects without any commercial compensation, and we want them to have tools that make it easier for them to collaborate. This is not a free trial. The licenses are free for as long as the project wants to use the software.

To qualify for a free developer license:

  • The project or group must be related to software development.

  • It must be primarily non-commercial.

  • Open source projects must use an OSI approved open source license, have a publicly accessible code base, and have a publicly accessible application.

  • User groups must have a public community.

  • Note: non-profit or non-commercial projects unrelated to software development are not eligible for the free developer licenses.

Use our new, simplified online forms to apply:

  • Open Source Application

  • Developer User Groups Application

I hope to see a bunch of projects take us up on this offer!

2

> 2. It must be primarily non-commercial.

Most of the open source software projects don’t comply with this rule…

3

Nyco,

Excellent point!

I agree that most open source software projects have a commercial element, and it can be difficult to determine whether a project is primarily non-commercial. In cases where a company has a dual open source / commercial licensing model and that company has control over the product releases, they are unlikely to qualify for a free license. When companies offer services around an open source project, the line gets a bit fuzzy. For example, we might offer a free license to the Linux kernel project, but not to Novell for Suse, since they have a services business and commercial offerings for their Linux product.

In general, we try to be flexible and do the right thing for each case. For companies running a commercial business based on open source, we would expect for them to pay for a license like any other business customer. We want to use our free license program to support open source projects that have limited resources and rely primarily on volunteers.

4

I understand. I don’t have any experience thus any advice for this kind of licensing issue, but have you considered hosting free/opensource software projets? Have you considered the Affero GPL? http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html

xmpp:nyco@jabber.fr