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Licensing
Please make sure you read our official information about the licenses here.
IMPORTANT: below is not legal advice. Please consult your lawyer about licensing & usage of open-source software!
One of the main requirements for usage of the AGPLv3 open-source software is to keep changes in the source code under the same license and make them public. For example, make a public fork on Github of our repositories and do changes there. Do not modify or remove the AGPL v3 license from your fork!
We decided to go with the AGPLv3 license for the same reasons many other companies who build true open-source software make the same choice. For example, see the recent move of Plausible described here: https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses (some text below adapted from that blog post)
AGPL is designed to ensure corporations contribute back to the open-source community, e.g. when running the software as a service in the cloud. If you used AGPL-licensed code in your web service in the cloud, you are required to open source it. It basically prevents corporations that never had any intention to contribute to open source from profiting from the open-source work.
GPL license helps minimize the possibility that corporations can take advantage and profit from open-source software without contributing back to the project and the open-source. It basically says that as we open-sourced our code so should you too and everyone can benefit from it.
A corporation needs to be clear and provide a prominent mention and link to the original project so people that are considering using their version of the software can be aware of the original source. If a corporation modifies the original software, they need to open source and publish their modifications by for instance contributing back to the original project.
So how can a corporation commercialize a FOSS project without open-sourcing their modified code? They can purchase our commercial license(s) to remove the copyleft restrictions and in that way support the original project.
Our commercial licenses are required, for example, if you don't want to release your code changes as open-source (e.g. you want to keep code private). We encourage everyone to use our open-source versions to benefit the community (and as a result make our platform better).
You can check more information about our Commercial Licenses and they cost at https://ever.co/pricing
Our white label licenses are very expensive, tens of thousands of $ and they still have some % of transactions and/or employees qty based fees.
The idea here is simple: if you want to use our platforms for your own business, it's actually relatively cheap (https://ever.co/pricing) or even free (as long as you keep with AGPLv3 license requirements).
However if you want to "close" our source code and charge clients (or even get some other benefits from it, e.g. give it for free but get something else in return) without providing benefits for our company or our community, that is where costs go up significantly.
It's the same with almost any GPL / AGPL based project... You can use it for yourself, but it's expensive to "resell" unless you can share your code changes in public (giving it for free with "private" code changes is still considered "resell")
So to summarize: if you can go with our community editions (AGPL v3) for your Whitelabel, I would recommend using that and you don't have to pay us any fees as long as you can comply with the AGPLv3 license. Of course, you will have to provide access to such public repos to your customers too and it's important to note that if they will want to do any changes to the code, it's again will need to be public forks, etc.
Few more examples:
- case #1 - your client is fine to keep code changes public. They can just fork our repos and use it according to AGPL v3. You can charge them for some customization services or consulting, etc.
- case #2 - you/your client wants to build a food delivery company and does not want to share code changes. So you/they can pay a
$249 one-time fee and use both Ever Demand and Gauzy platforms paying a small 1% fee and 5$ per employee per month (see https://ever.co/pricing for more info). It's the "Small Business Edition" license they need for such a case. - case #3 - you want to take our software, do changes to it (e.g. change logos, add/change some more features, etc) and you are fine to keep it under AGPL v3 public. In such a case, you don't need any license from us, just do a public fork and use our community edition (AGPL v3 based license).
- case #4 - you want to take our software and do changes to it, but keep them private and sell it to your customers (or even provide them for free so they can keep source code private too). You have to pay lots of $ to us for a white label license and we still will enforce some limitations and some "usage" based fees to make sure that if you sell more of it, we also get paid more.
Q: Can I use the same brand name or Logo, i.e. "Ever" or "Gauzy"?
A: No, we hold a registered trademark Ever® and we have used Gauzy™ trademark and you can't use any of our trademarks without written permission. You need to replace our logo and brand name with your own in all apps of the platform!
Q: Can I use Ever Platform or Gauzy Platform software for free?
A: Yes, as long as you can comply with AGPLv3 license requirements, you can use our software for free!