Question: Commercial Usage

[ugintl]

Is it allowed to use the community edition for commercial purpose?

[ugintl]

Two scenarios.

1. I install it for a client and client uses for its own company.

2. Install it for a client and client uses it as a saas.

[evereq]

Hi, yes, AGPL v3 based software can be used commercially, but of course with restrictions described in the license.

For example, we think that one of the biggest "restrictions" for your scenarios is that you have to make your code changes public, e.g. public fork of our repo or just some zip archive with the code, etc.

For scenario 1, you can install it for your client, you can even charge $$$ for that service of installation, but if you changed source code you have to make your code open-source and under the same license. So essentially you are charging more like for your service...

For scenario 2, it's even more interesting. Not only you have to provide source code, but also if your "client" make any modifications, they also have to provide it for all SaaS clients! I.e. essentially, they "charge" for example for hosting services, but they must publish source code so anyone now can take that code and start SaaS too etc.

All that above is to make sure that the whole community benefits from any contributions (changes) of the source code, i.e. code changes must remain public.

Now, if you want to make sure you (or your clients) keep code changes private, you have to purchase other (commercial) licenses we offer. In such cases, some limitations of AGPLv3 will be removed and you will be able to keep code changes private.

You can read more about licenses here: https://github.com/ever-co/ever-gauzy/wiki/Licensing

Of course above is not legal advice, please consult a lawyer about any possible restrictions in regards to the usage of open-source and/or commercial licenses.

[ugintl]

So if I or client is not making any changes to the code, then there is no need to make the code public? and no need to buy commercial license?

I saw the pricing, it is annual pricing. I think it should be one time payment. This is lot of money.

In my opinion, if the license is little friendly, then more people will use it. Not every company out there earns thousands of dollars.

[evereq]

1. If the client does not make any changes to the code, it means that the code in our repo is the same as the code that the client runs. However, afraid, at least minimal changes would probably be required in any case, say change logo/brand name, etc? Unless of course it's for own internal usage by your client. Basically, in most cases, the simplest way is to just make a public fork of our repo and do tiny changes required and use it internally or even invite other clients to it, etc.

2. Regarding pricing, we do have a one-time payment option promotion, it's on our https://gauzy.co/pricing page. At the moment we have a promo of 99$ one-time payment and you get a license for 1 company and up to 10 employees included and can do any code changes and keep them private. Please note that such license does NOT allow resell of our software, i.e. you can't make SaaS with it, it only permits usage within some specific company/employees.

3. We also have monthly pricing options, not only year, etc. You can see again all that in https://gauzy.co/pricing. For example, for the 50$ per month, you can get a license for the same 1 company and 10 employees, and each additional employee will cost only 5$ per month, etc. All such licensing is needed mostly if you want to do some changes into Gauzy code and don't want for some reason to share such changes with the community.

4. Our goal is to encourage everyone to use the community edition of our software. While we try to keep our pricing to a minimum (where else you see the pricing of ~5$ per employee!?), we don't really want / we don't need to sell more commercial licenses before the software gets mature enough! So unless you really need to keep your code changes private, please try to use free community edition, that's the best option for most of our customers. If you want to keep code private, buy a license (with a promo or without) and that is really cheaper compared to any similar software on the market (in our opinion / from our research of course).

[evereq]

• More information about Ever Demand licensing is available in our Wiki: https://github.com/ever-co/ever-demand/wiki/Licensing.
• Feel free to ask questions in the comments below or send an email to ever@ever.co, we will be glad to help!
• For information about commercial licenses/pricing, please see https://ever.co/pricing.