Licensing and Pricing Update for Open Source Projects
With the next major releases to our Open Source software, we will be updating our licensing and pricing:
- Software that is compiled, notarized, and signed will require a license to be able to install and use the software. We will charge a license fee for each copy of the software based on the number of devices the software is used on and the license will need to be installed on devices that run our software. Our license is in a mobile config format and can be installed via MDM or manually.
- The Open Source projects will remain open source and customers can download, compile and distribute the software for free from our source code repository.
- We will continue to sell support for the Open Source software.
Customers with existing support contracts will not be affected by this change and will continue to have access to the compiled releases.
Why are we doing this?
We love Open Source software. Since the start of Twocanoes Software, we have released open-source software, contributed to other projects, and promoted many open-source software projects. The internet is built on open-source software, and we have found it is a great way to contribute to the community. We have generally used BSD-style licenses for many different reasons, but the biggest one is that most Mac / Apple tools use BSD-style licenses. This makes our software more compatible with other projects that depend on, contribute to, and build on open-source software.
We have thought a lot about how to support our open-source projects best once they are released. Releasing code is only the first part of the project; bugs need to be fixed, new OS releases require changes to the codebase, and questions need to be answered. In the past, our approach has been to provide compiled, notarized, and signed versions of our open-source software releases and then sold support for organizations that wanted to support the project and get ongoing support.
Since the software is made available as a compiled, notarized, and signed package, the IT folks at a company find it difficult to justify paying for something to management that they already have deployed for free. Thus even if the software is successfully deployed, companies are still hesitant to pay for it.
Most companies would agree to support the project monetarily because it solves a problem for them; however, the problem isn’t the open source software but rather when the payment of the open source software needs to be justified.
A New Model
We remain dedicated to releasing our open-source projects freely on the internet. It is important to give back to other projects, support the community, share information, and allow others to build on top of what we have done.
However, for an open-source project to remain active and relevant, it requires support by the folks that use it. To accomplish all these goals, and for the health of our projects, it makes sense to continue to provide free access to the source code of our projects, but limit access to the compiled, signed, and notarized versions of the software to those who pay or are part of the team that work on the project. For example, if an organization is actively submitting pull requests to the project, they may get access to the compiled versions. Additionally, organizations or individuals whose open-source projects are used by our project and are still actively maintained may get access to the compiled versions.
The Details
As with any new model, how it is implemented is very important. We will be starting by having a unified model for a license for the compiled version of our software and will charge a yearly fee. We will also provide a trial license for those that want to test the software before buying a license.
Our current licensing system uses macOS profiles to distribute licenses via MDM (or manually), and we do not require individualized licenses for each system. A single profile can deploy a single license file to each user that will provide a license for all covered clients. We want to make it easy to use our software and help those using it see the value in what they are getting.
We will be rolling out this change in the next major release of all of our open-source apps that are released in compiled form.