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Licensing
Please make sure you read our official information about the licenses here.
Ever Gauzy Platform and Ever Demand Platform are dual-licensed under GNU AGPL v3 and commercial licenses.
IMPORTANT: below is not legal advice. Please consult your lawyer / your own attorney for legal advice about licensing & usage of open-source software! Purchasing a commercial license from Ever Co. LTD removes the GNU AGPL v3 obligations from Ever Gauzy or Ever Demand software.
If you distribute, host, or create derivative works of the Ever Gauzy Platform and Ever Demand Platform software over the network, the GNU AGPL v3 license requires that you also distribute the complete, corresponding source code of the combined work under the same GNU AGPL v3 license. This requirement applies whether or not you modify our platforms. Please consult the license here or review the FAQs below. In short, to self-host our platform, you must respect the terms of the AGPLv3 license which you normally don't have to worry about for personal use.
One of the main requirements for using 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 make 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 prevents corporations that never intended 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 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 source. If a corporation modifies the original software, they need to open source and publish its modifications by, for instance, contributing back to the original project.
So how can a corporation commercialize a FOSS project without open-sourcing its modified code? They can purchase our commercial license(s) to remove the copyleft restrictions and, in that way, support the original project.
When you host or distribute Ever Gauzy and Ever Demand platforms over a network, AGPL v3 applies to you. Any distribution or copying of our software modified or not has to comply with the obligations specified in the AGPL v3 license. You must include the source code, full license text, and the original copyright notice along with the object code.
We recommend the Free Software Foundation’s interpretation of the GNU AGPL v3 license.
Creating combined or derivative works of our software requires all such works to be released under the same license. So to re-expose any parts of the Ever Gauzy Platform to your users as a feature of your product (e.g. Whitelabel), or to build a feature on top of Ever Gauzy Platform, to comply with AGPLv3 your product must be licensed under AGPLv3 or you must get a commercial license.
If Ever Gauzy or Ever Demand source code is included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.
By contrast, pipes, sockets, RESTful APIs, and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.
Merely aggregating Ever Gauzy or Ever Demand software into your distribution usually does not constitute derivative works. For more information, please refer to the GPL FAQ.
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 their cost at https://gauzy.co/pricing.
If you run the non-profit or open-source project(s), please see here for more information.
Usually, 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 (open-source) platforms for your (own) business, it's relatively cheap (https://gauzy.co/pricing) or even free (as long as you keep with AGPLv3 license requirements).
However, suppose 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 community. In that case, 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, we 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 want to make any changes to the code, it again will need to be public forks, etc.
Here are a few more examples:
a) Case #1 - your client can keep code changes public. They can fork our repos and use them according to AGPL v3. You can charge them for some customization services or consulting, etc.
b) 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 fee of 249 USD (one-time discounted price for both Ever Demand and Ever Gauzy Small Business Edition license) and use both Ever Demand and Ever Gauzy platforms, paying a small 1% fee and 5$ per employee per month (see https://ever.co/pricing for more info). They need the "Small Business Edition" license for such a case.
c) Case #3 - you want to take our software and make 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. Make a public fork and use our community edition (AGPL v3-based license).
d) Case #4 - you want to take our software and make 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 ensure that if you sell more of it, we also get paid more. For example, see below 2 Options we provide at the moment for the Enterprise License of Ever Gauzy Platform:
- Option #1 single company license with unlimited employees. It means you will have to buy a license from us for each company you onboard (the license will cost 139$ per month for each company). In that option, you don't have to worry about qty of employees in each company you onboard; only you need to pay for the number of companies.
OR
- Option #2 unlimited companies license (so you don't have to buy multiple licenses!) but only up to 10 employees in each company. If your customers need more than ten employees, they will have to pay 10$ per employee per month to us (of course, we can provide a reseller discount from that amount depending on volume)
You can select either Option #1 OR Option #2 for the Enterprise Edition license.
Note: we do not currently have a license for unlimited companies with unlimited employees (but you can imagine the cost to be very high for such a license as it essentially will have almost no restrictions)
Q: Can I use the same brand name or Logo, e.g., "Ever" or "Ever Demand" or "Ever Gauzy" or "Gauzy" etc.?
A: No, we hold a registered trademark Ever®, and we have used Ever Demand™ and Ever Gauzy™ trademarks, and you can't use any of our trademarks without written permission. You must replace our logo and brand name with your own in all apps on the platform!
Q: Can I use Ever Demand Platform or Ever Gauzy Platform software for free?
A: Yes, as long as you comply with AGPLv3 license requirements, you can use our software for free!
Q: Is there any difference in code between commercial and open-source editions?
A: No, both editions currently have the same source code. So essentially, you only need to pay for a license when you need it, and you don't need to think about code is different depending on your license/edition.
Q: Is there support & maintenance?
A: Yes, we have software engineers who can help you; rates are 25-45$ per hour, don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected] to get more information. However, please note that our platforms are extremely complex/technical, and it's usually best to have a full-time developer(s) who will work on customizations for the long-term/full-time for you. Simply put - if you don't have a developer(s) or can't afford to hire one full-time, we suggest looking at other platforms instead of our solutions.