EULA and Data Center for free apps

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

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