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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 modified our platforms. Please consult the license here or review the FAQs below.
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 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 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.
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://ever.co/pricing.
Usually what we suggest to everyone who is interested in commercial edition is the following:
- First, decide if you can release your code changes as open-source or you can't.
- If you can release your changes as open-source (under the same AGPLv3, with our copyright/notices and other requirements), your costs will be essentially 0. You don't need to buy a commercial license.
- If you can't release your changes open-source (i.e. want to keep changes private), understand the pricing of our software (https://ever.co/pricing), take community edition (open-source code in this Github repo), and build your solution. You do NOT need to buy a license during development, you can very well develop (i.e. run locally) everything for X months without a need to buy our commercial licenses. When you are ready to launch your solution (e.g. start providing access for your customers to your solution), please approach us and we will work out the best pricing structure for your business. Maximum it will be prices highlighted on our site, but we most probably will be able to suggest something better, specifically for your use case!
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://ever.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 will want to make any changes to the code, it's again will need to be public forks, etc.
Here are a few more examples:
a) 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.
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
c) 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).
d) 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, 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 ever@ever.tech 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.