We're making all our plugins free!
Strange, but true, both Theme Builder and Community Bubbles are now completely free for everyone forever.
Are Adaptavist insane?
No - we're doing this so we can properly focus on the services side of our business, including managed hosting, support, consultancy, training, plugin development, customisation and other things that result in great outcomes for our customers.
We've been listening to the feedback from our customers and also our own staff:
- Smaller customers don't want the expense of commercial plugins on top of Confluence
- Larger customers don't want to waste time dealing with software licenses
- Transactional customers hate our sales process
- Non-transactional cstomers want us to focus more on their needs
- Customers who don't want support don't want to subsidise those who do
- Software licensing inevitably forces vendors to start adding increasingly useless random features to products to drive license sales (think "Microsoft Office"...) - we really want to avoid such insanity
How will these changes affect existing customers?
Existing customers will continue to receive support and updates from Adaptavist during the remainder of their maintenance period (which, by default, is 12 months from the point at which they received the license key).
All existing customers should already have received their "Support Code", which is a number in the format SC-xxxx-xxxx. If you have not yet received your support code, please contact us as you'll need it in order to get support from Adaptavist.
Once the maintenance period expires, you can still install and upgrade the plugins free of charge - a maintenance extension or license key will no longer be needed.
How will the changes affect new customers?
New customers will be entitled to install, upgrade and use the plugins completely free of charge and can seek assistance with problems from the community in our online forums.
What if I need support directly from Adaptavist?
If you need an equivalent support level to that provided when the plugins were commercial, you'll need our Support Service service. This service also includes support for your server environment, Confluence and a growing range of plugins (including Theme Builder and Community Bubbles) for a low monthly cost.
If you need guaranteed response and resolution times, greater weekly coverage and additional contact methods, we offer several Service Level Agreements to suit various needs.
I was in the process of making a purchase - what happens now?
If we have provided you with an invoice or quote it will be valid for 30 days and you can still purchase a license against it so long as the purchase is completed prior to July 1st 2009.
This way you can take advantage of the support contract which is equivalent to our Remote Hosting service, only less expensive as it is specific to one plugin.
Are you going to keep developing the plugins?
Yes, we will continue to develop the plugins and release new versions.
Theme Builder and Community Bubbles are vital for Adaptavist and a large number of our customers worldwide.
To ensure new versions of the plugins are more stable, we are going to make each successive release of a plugin require the latest version of Confluence. Older versions of the plugins will remain available should they be required for use with older versions of Confluence.
Will you be open sourcing the plugins?
Yes, we're just not sure when. We need to make sure that all commercial libraries used in the plugins are replaced with open source libraries first.
We have already been working on this task for the past 3 months and are committed to the continuing process. We have struggled to find reliable open source equivalents to some of the commercial libraries we have used, so decided to take the plugin and develop our own.
All of these new libraries are also being open sourced and you can find them in our open source space and we encourage you to take advantage of them in your own projects.
