Licensing of Titanium chaotic and unclear
developer.appcelerator.com
developer.appcelerator.com
To follow up on my original point: The OP makes it seem like Appcelerator is shaking them down after the fact (and breaking the licensing/pricing model advertised for the product) yet there is no evidence of it. No one at Appcelerator has confirmed this has happened nor has anyone else in the comments had a similar issue.
It sounds more like Appcelerator reached out to upsell and it was taken/communicated badly.
http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/142516/warning-li...
Jeff (CEO of Appcelerator).
[edit: and... you avoided the issue completely. pity.]
if they debug their code the same way they debug their business processes than titanium would be the windows vista of mobile development frameworks.
If we have broken any licensing terms, then I would like to have been contacted, and Appcelerator to tell us and exactly what we were doing wrong, so that we can resolve it.
Unfortunately this response doesn't address any of my problems - it's the usual "we care and we are growing" spiel. I empathise to some extent as I know it's hard to build a technical business, but this didn't address the trust issues, and I'm still no clearer about whether Monday morning we're still expected to license from them?
Worst of all for me, I now have a damaged relationship with a not particularly technical client who sadly is likely to associate "open source" with "legal problems".
"To be crystal clear here, our intentions are that we will not charge for development that happens under the “App Explore” product (i.e., the free version). Usage of the Appcelerator platform (Titanium Mobile SDK, Titanium Studio, Analytics and Cloud Services) at this level is permitted for all applications, both commercial and free, with no financial obligation to Appcelerator."
Again, APL code on Github. APL is a permissive and "biz friendly" license as we all know.
BS.
It really does not tell me if I can use it to do freelance contract, which is the base of the question...
Or rather, I was.
This incident, and their response, is a complete dealbreaker.
I cannot deduce anything about what their true licensing policies might be from those 9 paragraphs.
I'm much happier using Phonegap, Knockout, and Kendo Mobile to build apps.
e.g. Apache 2.0
>> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3966116/where-to-put-open...
He's using something else there (perhaps their cloud services who are probably free for free apps and costs money for paid apps).
Unless it was for a huge client that's gotten hundreds of thousands of downloads(which I don't think is the case), it seems like there's something else going on here.
It doesn't appear to be a scam, more a case of an over zealous sales department.
However, even if it is to do with displaying the Apache license as mentioned below, the behavior is pretty aggressive and financially orientated when a simple request could resolve it.
I will post a follow up comment when I know more, but for now the dev relations team has reached out to us...
The "rogue employee", in almost every single case I've ever seen, is just an arms-length way for companies to behave badly while keeping plausible deniability. See: Yelp.
The problem is, this strategy/dark pattern works.
>Was the sales rep over eager and trying to hussle to get a deal? Probably. In my opinion, that's the job of the rep and we work with hundreds of new paying customers each quarter and we've only had a few complaints about it.
Stay away - go native or phonegap
[sorry] we will not charge for development that happens under the “App Explore” product (i.e., the free version). Usage of the Appcelerator platform (Titanium Mobile SDK, Titanium Studio, Analytics and Cloud Services) at this level is permitted for all applications, both commercial and free, with no financial obligation to Appcelerator. [sorry, we aren't transparent enough]
And that's where you made this a problem of your own making. :)
Anyone who uses these glorified WebView wrappers is doing themselves a disservice.
I've never used it, but my understanding is that Titanium does not run in a web view. It compiles the JS down to C/ObjC, then that gets compiled to native code by Apple's compiler.
http://www.appcelerator.com/plans-pricing
It could also be that an appcelerator salesman was a bit aggressive on that front but I bet this is not the case - 99% of the time, people are breaching licenses without even knowing it.