Re: [Wrapper-user] Licensing Comments

[Markus S. <sc...@gm...>]

Just to clarify from another users point of view:

We appreciate the work of Leif and it's ok for us to pay for a developer
license. But the pricing is really high in contrast to other software
components that we use.

So maybe it would be a good idea to split the developer license into tiers -
maybe with some smaller threshold like 100, such that even small programs
may use the wrapper at a reasonable price.

Sincerely
Markus

2008/4/22, mc...@gm... <mc...@gm...>:
>
>  Thankyou for your detailed reply Leif.
>
> I have sympathy for the arguments you put forward, and as I said, I don't
> have a problem with actually paying a license fee to use JSR.
>
> My issue is that the license stratification, rules and pricing that you
> have established just don't work for me, and I suspect won't work for a
> large number of others.
>
> Put simply, host-based licensing is a complete pain in the behind, and you
> can imagine how completely impossible things would get if we had to manage
> this for every piece of Open Source code we used in the same application.
>
> The only model that makes sense in my view, is developer-based licensing.
> But in this case, you have to have license fees that are reasonable. You
> would do really well, I'm sure, to have a simple developer license where the
> price tag was in the order of a hundred dollars or two. I'm sure you would
> get almost universal uptake from everyone using it for commercial
> purposes....it would be a no-brainer.  But as things stand, a large number
> of users will actually have to think about their options...their
> packaging/admin/management overheads are going to far outweigh the actual
> cost of the host-based license.
>
> And if you're worried about the small number of product companies who
> might be selling thousands of copies of a commercial product that includes
> JSR, the solution is simple. Have two tiers of developer license...for the
> simple reason that numerically, most users who are using it commercially
> will not have the thousands of sites that might justify the cost of the your
> dev license. So you set an arbitrary threshold, say 1,000. If you have more
> than that many separate host installations, you need an add-on license that
> takes you from 1,000 to 10,000 sites. Maybe that one has the pricetag you
> have currently set.
>
> My twenty cents.
>
> I'll take any further discussion with you off-line.
>
> Kind regards...
>
>
>
>
>
> Leif Mortenson wrote:
>
> Milton,
> Thank you for your honest feedback.  We realize and
> expected that not all users would be initially positive about
> the changes to the Wrapper's License.   But we feel that in
> the long run, this will make the Wrapper a much stronger
> product both for our Commercial and Open Source user
> base.
>
> The Wrapper has from the beginning been open source
> and the Community Edition will continue to be so.  We
> appreciate your kind praise of the Wrapper and will make
> every effort to continue to live up to your expectations.
>
> 1) License
>
> Older versions of the Java Service Wrapper were released
> under a very liberal license which placed no restrictions on
> how the Wrapper was used by our users.
>
> Tanuki Software has always treated the Wrapper as a core
> technology and done our best to support, document, develop,
> and test it as we would a commercial product.  This has
> resulted in a stable and flexible tool which has gained wide
> acceptance.
>
> As you are surely aware, providing any quality software
> product comes at a significant cost in both time and money.
> The Wrapper is a culmination of several years of work.  With
> the Wrapper remaining a purely open source product, Tanuki
> Software was not receiving near enough revenue to justify a
> high level of new development.
>
> In the interest of continuing to improve the Wrapper to meet
> the needs of our large user base we decided to offer commercial
> Editions in ADDITION to the community Edition.   This new
> revenue stream has enabled us to directly fund Wrapper
> development.  Which will result in a much more vital application.
>
> We realize that the change to a GPL2 license for the Community
> Edition has added restrictions to how and where the Community
> Edition can be used.  While the GPL is not perfect, the goal here
> is to provide a solution that will enable open source projects to
> continue to use the Wrapper, while at the same time allow for a
> viable business model and thus support its development.  This
> is a model very similar to what MySQL has done.
>
> We have not yet implemented a FLOSS license like MySQL has
> which enables MySQL to be used with many non-GPL OSS licenses,
> but we have no intention to encumber purely OSS projects and
> will work to come up with a fair solution to this problem.
>
> 2) Community Involvement
>
> You are correct that we did not make a wide spread
> announcement of these business plans to the Wrapper community
> at large until just before the 3.3.0 release.  However we have
> been communicating with several of our long time users over the
> last year attempting to get a feel for how these changes would
> affect their businesses and projects.
>
> 3) Feature Set
>
> When we designed the 3 Editions of the Wrapper we were
> very conscious of our long time user base.   The 3.3.0
> Community Edition of the Wrapper contains ALL of the
> features that were available in the 3.2.3 release.  Plus a
> number of new features and bug fixes.
>
> The Commercial Standard and Professional Editions of the
> Wrapper contain all of the features available in the Community
> Edition plus several additional features that are completely
> new to 3.3.0.
>
> Once again, there were NO features removed from the
> Community Edition of the Wrapper as you claim.
>
> We will be continuing to implement features in the Community
> of Wrapper, but will of course also be adding features that will
> be initially available to the commercial editions.
>
> Any patches or code which is submitted by the user base and
> accepted by Tanuki Software will of course be available in the
> Community Edition.
>
> If you have any concerns about specific features, please feel
> free to contact me directly or on list.
>
> 4) Pricing
>
> The Pricing for the Wrapper is something that came out of
> analysis of our costs to maintain the product, the market for
> similar tools, and feedback from users.  The development
> licenses are extremely flexible and unrestrictive to allow our
> customers to use the Wrapper at will within their products.
> If the current pricing does not fit into your business model,
> for example if you sell to a very small number of customers
> and provide a low cost product it may be possible to
> arrange a restricted version of the development license to
> meet your needs.   Please feel free contact
> sa...@ta... to discuss those terms.
>
> 5) Branching
>
> Branching the Wrapper has always been possible, though
> the license and code do require that relevant copyright
> notices always be made available in any such branches.
>
> It is very rare however that an OSS project is successfully
> branched unless the goals of the two projects each satisfy
> respective divergent needs.
>
> The Wrapper also continues to be actively developed and is
> offered at a price that is much less than the resources that
> would be required by any 3rd party to duplicate these
> efforts.
>
> As stated above, we have also made every effort to come up
> with a solution that is fair to our OSS user base while at the
> same time providing the funding required to maintain the
> project's vitality.   Efforts by the OSS community in effect take
> advantage of the OSS licenses to work around our business
> model would have the obvious and unfortunate effect of
> discouraging companies like Tanuki Software from continuing
> to invest in OSS.
>
> We have of course always been aware of this possibility, and
> will rely on our continued development and support efforts
> to continue to provide value to you and the rest of our users.
>
> We look forward to any further feedback you might have.
>
> Sincerely,
> Leif Mortenson,
> Tanuki Software, Inc.
>
>
> Milton Taylor wrote:
>
>  Q. So when is Open Source not open source?
> A. When the copyright owner changes their mind!
>
>  From the Tanuki JSR web-site, and still on display:
> /"The Wrapper, being an open source application, is free and will always
> remain free. "/   Cheap words in hindsight?
>
> I like many others use the Tanuki Java Service Wrapper because it is a
> great solution to a common problem.
>
> I actually don't have a problem with paying some sort of license fee for
> is use, but for something like this, I need to be able to build it into
> my installer, and I'm not going to go to the bother of creating a
> different installer for each target host etc, hence the only version of
> JSR that appears relevant is the Developer version. There is no way I
> can justify paying thousands of dollars for a developer license for this
> piece of work, as useful as it is. Nor could I justify the hassle of
> administering a per-host/per-customer license. Sorry!
>
> What I really object to is the fact that features that were previously
> part of the (true) Open-Source version have now been classified as
> "Professional Features", i.e. the free version is now the functionally
> crippled one. I also think you have done yourself a great dis-service by
> not consulting with your users about what you planned to do. (I don't
> see any prior discussion about this in the mail archive)
>
> So, I guess we're either stuck with version 3.2.3 - unable to
> legitimately obtain the fixes available in 3.3.0 - or we switch to
> something else.
>
> Or, someone creates a true open-source fork as of 3.2.3 and we all carry
> on from there.
>
> Yours in disgruntlement...
> mctozzy
>
>
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