We have recently seen a few licenses of our addon given away for free by Atlassian, with the status “Free/ Open-source”, but it seems a bit unclear with the agreements here.
The open source license request ( Open Source Project License Request | Atlassian ) requires that the specific Atlassian products are publicly available and use public signup to be eligible for open source license request.
One of these cases is an academic institution, so I would have assumed that to go under academic licensing and not open-source?
Could I please ask that:
The partner agreement is updated to include the information that Atlassian can do this.
The requirements for open-source giveaway would be a bit clear. To my reading, the cases I have seen are not fulfilling what Atlassian requires.
When this happens, it would be great if the open-source licenses would at least require the “purchaser” to review the addon so that there would be some added value also to marketplace addon developers.
Academic licenses should be 50% off list price. There seems to also be a new license type, Classroom License which is free for classroom use. (in my case however, the license type is clearly set to OPEN_SOURCE )
The community license is for charitable organisations, among other requirement is non-academic and that they would not otherwise afford it. I would guess this would be seen in the API as a COMMUNITY license type.
It would be great to hear some feedback from Atlassian on this topic.
Ah, interesting found. As you are saying it, we have a lot of “academic institutions” with COMMUNITY licenses… (it’s astonishing what is eligible for community licenses from Atlassians point of view)
Nevertheless, what I wanted to say is, that I read 4.1 like “Atlassian can give customers any price, despite what you have set as price”.
So basically this covers every case, where Atlassian gives out free licenses, for whatever reason…
I checked the apis and it seems to be possible to make the app behave different depending on if the license is a paid or free variant. This is what Atlassian themself use to add the footer about the instance being provided for free.
I also noticed some addons already use this information to add another footer. Is this considered ok? If so… I might actually do that to at least get some information out about my addon being used.
I implemented the same solution as Gliffy now, so adding a footer to these “free” licenses.
I also noticed that Atlassian seem to have given away OPEN_SOURCE licenses of my addon to Bitbucket instances running a datacenter version of Bitbucket… which seems a bit odd to say the least. One would assume that only an OPEN_SOURCE licensed Bitbucket instance can run OPEN_SOURCE licensed addons. Otherwise it means Atlassian are still getting paid full, and just the marketplace partners are not getting paid.
(Yes, I have a marketplace support ticket open, 1 month now and no response)
EDIT: Marketplace suddenly replied and told me to contact some other support as they don’t handle opensource licenses.
I assume it is possible indeed, but this would cause problems for the customer which I don’t want to do. As I see it, the problem is fully on Atlassian side as they provided these licenses.
After discussing with several levels of support, I think I’ll just give up on this. Atlassians standing point is that “at some point in time the requirements for OPEN_SOURCE where fulfilled” and for that reason they can also give away addon licenses although the requirements are no longer fulfilled.
