Pricing and Open Source Policy
Mario Zechner
We’ve been listening in on the RoboVM community since the announcement of our acquisition by Xamarin. There are two points of concern within the community we’d like to address.
What happens to licenses of existing customers and sponsors?
As stated when we announced our pricing updates, all existing customers can keep their license and all included features at the price they paid before our pricing change. Of course, if you choose to move to one of the new pricing tiers, you will pay the new price for the features in that tier.
libGDX and PlayN users have been the cornerstone of the RoboVM community for the past 2 years. We created a special licensing offer for them via which they can use RoboVM for an unlimited amount of commercial and noncommercial games for free. We also provide free licenses to students and open source contributors. You can see our program pricing for more details.
If you have been a sponsor of RoboVM in the very early days, we’d like to offer you a free, lifetime license. Please contact us at sup...@robovm.com.
What happened to the OSS version?
RoboVM is a complicated piece of technology that we have worked hard for years to create. Over the past few months, we have seen competitors actively exploiting our good faith by using our open source code to compete with us directly in commercial products. On the flip side, we have received almost no meaningful contributions to our open source code. You can imagine how disappointing this has been to us; we had hoped our initial business model of OSS with proprietary extensions (like our debugger and interface builder integration) would work. But in light of the low contributions and behavior of competitors, we decided to stop automatically releasing changes to the core of RoboVM as open source.
The way we went about this was clearly the wrong approach. We should have announced it the day it became clear that this change needed to happen. As a young company of 6 people we clearly have a thing or two to learn about communication. We apologize for this. We should have been upfront with you about this change.
Every member of our small team is part of at least one OSS project out there. OSS is close to our hearts. RoboVM 1.8 was the final release to include a notice that the source code would be made available under GPL, and so it should be no surprise that it is our intention to make that our final release of the source. We will push the sources of RoboVM version 1.8 to the public repositories this week.
We also recognize the contributions of each of the 17 external contributors to RoboVM, be it a single line change or something more substantial. Ever single external contributor will be granted a free, lifetime license. Please contact us via sup...@robovm.com.
Talk to us
We understand your concerns and would like to talk to you directly. Please ping us at he...@robovm.com.
Sampath
It would be interesting to know what competitors exploited the OSS code and in what commercial products?
Can the last RoboVM 1.8 under the GPL be used to compile apps that are submitted to the Apple app store? I read on Twitter that there might be a problem that the GPL is not allowed. Or is there some classpath exception in place to prevent apps being compiled with RoboVM 1.8 OSS to be GPL itself?