Hello everybody,
I am really sorry for the confusion regarding our new licensing, and the time it took me to response to your complaints. Let me try to explain why we are doing it, I hope that you will understand. And I am going to be clear on it, so nobody can say we want to draw the curtain over it:
Astaro is a company, not an open source project. Our focus is to offer a useful solution to our customers, and a profitable business model to our partners. The problem: it is hard to build up a reseller business on a software that is freely available from the vendor in an unlimited version. We had over 15k unlicensed installations of version 2 – hard to explain to partners who invest in presales support and marketing for Astaro.
Parts of our software are licensed proprietary, that allows us to sell it. We strongly believe in the free software idea, and we are supporting it by publishing own code under the GPL, sponsoring events, and paying developers so they can continue their work on free software projects.
We give away our product to home users for free, because we want the very valuable feedback. We don't earn money by selling Surf and Virus Protection to home users, we just can't give it away for free as it isn't our own software.
We think 10 IPs, 10 IPSec tunnels, 3 NICs and 5 SMTP domains (yes, its five, it was always five, those of you who registered might have seen it, sorry for that mistake) is good enough for 99.9% of all private home networks. Dont you think? Please remember it is not somehow a 'free version' of ASL, its solely for private home use (and it was always that way). If you need an eval key: no problem, just contact our sales and they will send it to you right away.
The upgrade from version 2 to version 3 is free. That's because we think it is a lot better, and we want our users to benefit from that – only if they want. Please note that licensing for version 2 didn't change, and we are going to maintain this version as well.
The limitations, the pricing (which also stayed the same) and the free upgrade allow our partners to offer Astaro Security Linux at a reasonable price for every specific setup. A small company gets stateful firewalling, IPSec and PPTP VPN, traffic shaping, content filtering, and virus protection for less than 700 $, isn't that competitive? A large company gets the same functionality at highest performance for a unlimited network size including Gigabit support for less than 7k $ - that is still a lot cheaper than every other product in that range with the same functionality.
Basically all of our partners are happy with the new model, and at the moment we are really busy signing up new partners. So right now there is no reason to change it, sorry.
I very much hope that this explains a little better what we are doing, what our focus is, and hopefully cleans the air a little. Lets keep the discussion going, we are willing to learn. Hey, thats why we are giving out those free licenses [:)]
Jan Hichert
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