Page Operations
Browse SpaceI wrote this article, and the article Are These Reasonable Uses For a Single Node 500 User Confluence License after a comment from one of their employees indicated that I may not be able to freely use the count of users they are trying to sell me a license for.
Sample Usage Scenario of A Small Web Hosting Company's First Confluence License
Let's say I buy a 500 user single node license to Confluence for $4000. Which of the following can I do with it:
1) I create an admin account, and a non admin account for my own use.
2) I create 10 private wiki spaces, one for each of 10 of my consulting clients, and a total of 20 user accounts including those clients and their employees or prospects or clients, having accounts within those spaces. I may be able retain them as paying consulting clients because of my innovative way of using a Confluence wiki to communicate with my clients.
3) A public wiki space for another client, who is a teacher with 25 students of his private class, so a total of 26 users. He pays me $500 to have this space for a year.
4) For 30 of my hosting customers (different than consulting clients), I create 30 private spaces to communicate with them. Each has one user account for the customer, for a total of 30 users. They are each paying me $100 per year for their web hosting & email services, but not for a wiki service.
5) I create a "Web Mill Private Customer Tips And Techniques" space, which the 30 users from #3, the teacher from #1, and the 20 users from #1, get access to. No new users account for access only to this space.
6) I create a wiki space about making money from Google, and I sell membership to the group for that wiki for $49 a year. 18 of my clients and web hosting customers buy memberships, and I sell an additional 100 user accounts to others who don't buy any other service from me, so total of 118 accounts get access to this space.
7) A friend does some tile work for my house, so I create a wiki space for him to showcase his tile work, in exchange for a big discount on the work. I figure out how to get the content in his wiki space to show up under his www.besttiles.com domain.
8) Someone else asks me to let him create 5 wiki spaces in my system, and to have up to 25 total users, so I allow that for a prepayment of $490.
9) I sell religious and health books, and I setup a wiki space for literature evangelist training, where my trainer participates and gives me and others the latest presentations and ideas on how to sell more books. I give a free account to him, 5 user accounts to people who work at the publishing house I buy the books from, and I gave free user accounts to 150 other literature evangelists around the company.
10) I setup four wiki spaces for some other projects for people who want to have up to 50 users each.
11) 4 months later, the credit cards for 10 of users on #6 have expired, and those customers do not renew, but I did a promotion and gave away 20 user accounts with access to the #6 space, and sold another 81 users access to the space.
12) A chiropractor web hosting client decides to create a wiki space in my wiki to see if he can use it as public forum to communicate with up to ten patients. I give him this trial for three months, and then we'll talk about whether he will keep his web hosting with me, and maybe pay an extra $100 a year. I figure out how to serve his wiki space content on a subdomain of his main chiropractic website.
13) At the end of 6 months, the teacher asks for a refund, and for his space to be erased. The 26 accounts for the students and the teacher are removed.
14) At the end of 6 months, the four wiki spaces under #10 have only had a total of 30 new user accounts created, no where near the total allowed.
Note that all of these would be served out of my single instance of Confluence, without exceeding the total user count of my license.
Notice the total is 454 user accounts, leaving me with 46 unused user accounts. At no point did my user count exceed the total number of users that my license allows. Granted, #10 overcommits my total number licensed users, but if whoever is operating those spaces started signing up a lot of new users, I could either get rid of other unused user accounts to stay under my 500 user limit, or, more likely, I would buy a license for a larger number of users.
I believe the above usage scenario within a wiki installation should not cause any licensing issue for Atlassian. Note that most of the scenario's above are for things that aren't feasible to buy even Confluence Hosted, not to mention a complete license for an entirely separate wiki installation. It seems like a reasonable way for a web hosting services company to recoup the cost of a license, and grow their use of the wiki to need to buy an even bigger license from Atlassian. Some of the wiki space owners in the above scenarios may eventially decide they want their own wiki installations, resulting in more Confluence licenses being sold.
So, please tell me which of these situations of using a hypothetical single instance of 500 user licensed Confluence, would, and would not, be allowed according to the license.
Thanks,
- Garnet
 | 4/25/07 15:00pm PST Initial answer that I got from a phone call with Jonathan Nolen:
At this point Jonathan realized that he needs to refer this to the author of the license agreement, that he had no authority to interpret it in the way I'd like to see, (1 instance, certain number of users, do what you want with that number of users out of a certain instance.) I explained to Jonathan that while I'm not a lawyer, lawyers love to argue over the meaning of expansive words like "indirect". I could have my intellectual property lawyer review the license, but if afterwards, I tell him that several of the situations above that seem like indirect ways of making money from the wiki, that in fact the company doesn't consider indirect, would my lawyer throw his hands in the air and say that the license isn't really written to cover how they intend to enforce it, there's no actual meeting of the minds, it's therefore useless?!?!? I have several months experience with Confluence, and my reading of the license gave me no hint that the above scenarios, run out of a single instance of Confluence, and not violating the total count of licensed users, would violate the license. At this point in time, they've never explicitly documented on their website that they do not want to allow customers to setup wiki farms, or resell their licensed users within their copy of the wiki. They have in fact allowed feature requests to sit in their database for wiki farm related features, and there was no indication on any of those reports that those features won't be allowed because they would violate the license. The requests stay in the database where users can vote for them, leading one to suppose that perhaps someday those features might be implemented. |
