A LegStar Commercial License

Entreprises still intensively using mainframes these days tend to be very large. Although most of these companies are more and more comfortable using open source software, they are not comfortable at all with running unsupported code in production.

That creates a specific problem to LegStar since it is both Open Source an primarily of use for such large companies.

After receiving several requests from customers at LegSem we started looking into building some kind of commercial offering around LegStar.

Of course, we are not the first open source company to bang our head against this thorny issue, infoworld has a honest and funny write-up about this.

So this is what we came up with:

Committed to Open Source:

• First, LegStar is and will remain Open Source
• The core features will stay under the permissive LGPL as they are today and the advanced features will be GPL
• There won't be an entreprise product separate from the Open Source one. This means every single line of code will be available under an Open Source license

For Customers who need it:

• Besides the Open Source licenses, there will be a Commmercial License available. Yes, this a dual-licensing scheme
• The Commercial License describes the level of support that LegSem, or a business partner, provides
• LegSem will also shield Commercial Licensees from backward compatibility issues

This last point requires a little bit of explanation:

As we add new features or fix bugs in LegStar we generally pay attention to backward compatibility but we don't necessarily test it. As a result, new releases are not guaranteed to be backward compatible with your own developments. With the commercial offering, we will do additional, less frequent, releases that we will explicitly check for backward compatibility. These extra releases will only be available to commercial licensees.

LegSem is a small company and will not cover the entire world with that commercial license. What we intend to do is to work with business partners in territories where we are not present. So if your company would be interested in entering this type of deal with us please send a mail at contact@legsem.com.