EULA and Data Center for free apps

I’m developing several plugins for Bitbucket Server. I do it for free and they are all open sourced. The most popular one with 2.3k installs. Atlassian Marketplace

Two things have come up lately (Data Center compatibility and EULA) that is making me consider stop publishing my plugins in Marketplace. It seems to me that free plugins are not very welcome. I don’t know if that is the intention of Atlassian.

My question is really, did I interpret this information wrong?

1. Data Center compatibility

https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/marketplace/developing-apps-for-atlassian-data-center-products/

I’m getting bombarded with request to update my plugins to support Data Center. To become listed as compatible I would need extensive testing, writing a report about that… not something I will spend time on when doing free development.

2. End User License agreement

I got an email stating I need to provide a link to my “End User License agreement” in order to keep my plugins listed in Marketplace efter 31 March. I do not have such an agreement and I do not have any plans writing one. I do this for free, it is provided as is just like most other free software. This is also something I will not spend time on when doing things for free.

3 Likes

The requests for data center compatibility are sent by users, although, there is a button offered to users in the manage add-ons screen. I would suggest to automate sending the user back a default response that you don’t intend to create a data center version at this point and archive the email without having to see it.

Enter the text of the open source license as the EULA. The license defines the license rights of a user building the app and using it, and that’s a super-set of using it.

There’s always a quick and easy way to do these things, easier to just do them :).

The EULA aside, stability on data center is a critical item, especially considering how much users pay for it, I think users fed back that they expect Atlassian to perform some kind of auditing of plugins.

Hi @tomas.bjerre85,

Thanks for publishing your app for free. We thank you for sharing your work with others. Let me help with understanding the issues you’ve raised:

1. Data Center compatibility

Yes, you are correct in assessing that to be DC Compatible it is now more intensive than just checking a box indicating your app is compatible with DC. Why did we do this?

A checkbox on your listing used to be the way to indicate compatibility with DC and apps that did this were evaluated and quickly uninstalled from DC. We dug in to find out why and it turned out that apps in DC didn’t work well in a clustered environment that DC operates in. Ultimately these apps performed poorly and made for a bad DC experience for customers.

In November 2017 we worked with Vendors/developers at App Week in Amsterdam to come up with a framework and testing tool that would help certify apps for DC. That work has been going on since then and apps are now flowing into the Marketplace with actual certification to customers that it will work on Data Center without performance degradation.

So yes you’ll need to do testing, create a report, and there will be more testing during the approval process from Atlassian. This is to ensure DC apps work performantly in the clustered environment.

Some options for you:

  • Charge for your app in DC. Since it’ll take some amount of work to get Certified as DC Compatible it might be palatable for you to charge for that effort in DC. Just keep this talk in mind if you do that.
  • Do nothing. While we would love for your app to support DC (as does the user base of your app) there is no requirement to be compatible.

2. End User License agreement

Yes, we need EULAs or Terms of Service from all third-party vendors. Due to the recent GDPR laws in Europe, Atlassian can’t legally cover under our EULA what apps do with customer data as each app can be different and as such we need Apps to declare that specifically out for customers. See this post which talks about the updated Marketplace agreement update, specifically:

Marketplace Agreement update

The terms of the Atlassian Marketplace Vendor Agreement will be updated soon and we are targeting them to take effect at the **end of March 2019 **. Some of the changes we are making to the Atlassian Marketplace Vendor Agreement include:

  • Requiring all vendors to provide a legally sufficient set of (a) user terms and (b) privacy policy to users, and removing the “Standard EULA Terms”. This change reflects the multiple deployment options for apps (server and cloud) and gives vendors the flexibility to set their own terms with users.
  • Adding a minimum-security standard and setting forth procedures for reporting incidents
  • Clarifying our policy on privacy and data usage by vendors.
  • Clarifying that vendors cannot review their own apps or apps made by competitors.
  • Adding the ability for vendor Apps to be listed in currencies other than USD for certain countries (such as Euros and Yen)
  • Explaining in more detail how our App Programs work
  • Updating our terminology (replacing “Add-on” with “App”, “Publisher” with “Vendor”, etc.)

Please review or add a URL linking your EULA (for server apps) or Terms of Use (for cloud apps) , as appropriate, in the “End user license agreement” field (which we will be renamed to “End User Terms of Use”), located in the latest version of your app in the Manage App Version screen in Atlassian Marketplace. This link will be shown to customers in the app installation consent flow. Apps that do not have customer terms in place by 1 April 2019 will also be scheduled for de-listing.

Additionally, you might find this Data privacy guidelines for developer helpful.

Cheers,
Ralph

4 Likes

Ok that sounds like I cannot just resolve this by specifying link to Apache 2 license (pull-request-notifier-for-bitbucket/LICENSE at master · tomasbjerre/pull-request-notifier-for-bitbucket · GitHub) in the EULA field?

2 Likes

I edited the latest versions of the plugins to have EULA link to: Apache License, Version 2.0

If that is not acceptable, you need to inform me about that and I will remove the plugins from Marketplace.

Just got an email stating that my plugins will be delisted January 31 if I don’t add “legally sufficient Privacy Policy”.

When doing things for free I just do whatever I think is fun. And this legal stuff is not fun at all =) So I guess that means I’ll just keep releasing to GitHub and leave the Marketplace now!

3 Likes

This actually is a disgrace and is one of the most sensible add-on BB has . When can we expect similar functionality from Altassian? I have to thank @tomas.bjerre85 for the work he has done over many years. But my team within (cisco) has to find other alternatives.
C

3 Likes

thanks @tomas.bjerre85 for this plug-in. we used it a lot of times and now after upgrading the bitbucket, seems the plugin is not working anymore… btw @ChrisWilliams1 , have you found any other alternatives way for this?

1 Like

Thank you @tomas.bjerre85, we have pleasantly used your BB add-on.
I am also curious as to what alternatives there are @IkhwanAzmi ?

2 Likes

If people like, I am willing to DC-certify @tomas.bjerre85’s apps and host them on the Atlassian Marketplace.

If you can ping me with the app you would like DC-certified, I will start with those. For now I have a Bit-Booster customer currently using “Pull Request Notifier” so I will start with that one.

NOTE: I will not be altering the existing Apache 2 license, nor will I be charging any fees for this. (Obviously I cannot change Tomas’s copyright terms, but any additions I make to the plugins to keep them functioning will also be made under Apache 2 license.)

NOTE 2: I already have to DC-certify all my existing Bit-Booster apps, so adding a few more to that process is not too much extra work, and I already have all the hardware required to run the load tests on a 4-node DC Bitbucket cluster.

1 Like

I would like also to thank @tomas.bjerre85 for your work you have done over so many years. We have been using it with Bitbucket Server to send notifications to Jenkins (which runs a ci-library in groovy).

@IkhwanAzmi have you found an alternative to this plugin for Bitbucket Cloud? I have been investigating with no success until now.

1 Like