Closed Alpha & Licensing

It's been a while since we last spoke in public about PanGui. It's been a busy year, and we've been very hard at work. We're at the point where we're slowly beginning to offer early alpha previews to select people, starting with a very small circle of testers which can then grow as it makes sense. On a technical level, the core of PanGui is beginning to be in a very good spot. We'll begin talking more about PanGui in the coming months with multiple tech deep dives as we work towards an eventual fully open beta.

We also want to announce that we have a new Discord server dedicated solely to PanGui. It will be the best place to discuss PanGui, and to get in touch with the devs. We will also be using it to run the closed alpha waves.

This blog post is the first of many, and today, the topic is not technical, but no less important for it. Today we're talking about licensing. This will likely be the first of two licensing posts. Today, we present to you our current best idea. Next time, based on your feedback on this post, we will adjust accordingly and hopefully present final license agreements. Now, let's get into it.

The dream

Before we get into the details of the licensing we currently intend to launch with, let's get into the long-term vision of PanGui's licensing.

It is our dream and goal to one day be able to make PanGui's core library completely free and open source. The way this would hopefully work is, we would build tooling and services around PanGui and monetize those. Once that reaches a level that can sustain the company, the door would be open to fully open-source PanGui's core library without committing financial seppuku.

Why would we do this, you ask? Well, call us crazy, but we intend to play a part in changing and improving this industry. To do that, we have to provide a better technology platform than what came before, and the only way to really do that - we think - is to have that technology be completely free and non-proprietary.

We want to emphasize that this is an aspirational goal with a timeline of many years. We cannot promise it will happen, only that we will try our very best. We cannot sustainably start here. Before we can ever do it, we first have to figure out...

How to not starve

Back when we first launched the website announcing PanGui, we asked for your feedback on what sort of licensing PanGui should launch with. We mentioned the two imperatives we had: us being able to sustain and continue PanGui development and support without starving to death, and PanGui being as open and free as possible.

You were all very helpful! We've received dozens of suggestions and proposals from across various industries for how to license PanGui. There was a dizzying variety of ideas, but one thread stood out amongst the others as being the most commonly suggested, namely, the idea of dual licensing. As we went over it, we began to rather like the idea, and it is our current best candidate for the final licensing model to launch PanGui with.

So, what's dual licensing?

The basic idea is this: PanGui would launch under two licenses, with customers able to choose either based on their own needs. The first license would be a copy-left open-source license, something like GPL, and the second license would be a commercial license that allows for closed-source development.

License #1: Copy-left open-source

For those not in the know, copy-left open-source licenses are a kind of license that spread to the entire codebase that makes use of tools under said licenses. In short, if you use a GPL library, your entire codebase is now GPL, and you must publish the entire source for free and in a buildable state, if you want to distribute your product. For open-source or non-commercial development - including educational and hobby use - this kind of license is perfectly suitable, as those restrictions are not much of a hindrance. The restrictions do, however, make commercial development a bit of a challenge - it can be difficult to charge people for something, if you also have to give it away for free at the same time. This is where the commercial licence comes in.

License #2: Commercial license

For people who do need to develop proprietary, closed-source software, there is the commercial license, which is a more traditional-looking paid software license. We are, however, considering adding one wrinkle to the commercial license, namely that of making it free under a certain revenue cap. This would keep PanGui accessible to the "small professional/startup" market who still want to develop commercial software, but are still just finding their footing and are not flush with cash. We're not sure what the cap would be yet, but various numbers have been floated, mostly $200k, $500k, or $1 million yearly revenue. The commercial model, once paid, will likely be of the kind that gives access to updates for a year, with a renewal required for continued updates.

There are more details, of course - back charge clauses to prevent people from developing under license #1 and then switching to commercial at the last second, and so on. However, this is the basic idea. With this, we believe we can achieve a lot of our stated goals:

• PanGui will be free for the vast, vast majority of people, who never need to think about the licensing at all.
• We monetize only the serious commercial users, the ones who also have the ability to pay.
• The source will be redistributable, as long as the license terms are included so they also apply to new users of the redistributed source.
• It covers most use-cases with essentially no bureaucratic fuss or overhead: hobby use, education, non-profit, open-source, modding, and so on.

Some points of uncertainty remain, namely, what does the commercial license price scaling look like? It feels obvious that a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees doing a massive project involving hundreds of people should be paying more than a small team of ten barely scraping above the revenue cap. The method of scaling, though, is not obvious. At first glance, the easiest way of handling this is seat-based pricing, but what constitutes a "developer seat" is very difficult to define for a software library like PanGui, and so we find ourselves reluctant to go that way.

Our best idea, so far, is to offer customers a choice of two commercial pricing models:

• Project licensing: each project is licensed separately, with a few cost tiers that scale with project budget and/or team size.
• Company licensing: the company licenses PanGui for as many projects as they desire, with a few cost tiers that scale with company yearly revenue.

Finally, there is the third case, the catch-all "custom licenses". For some cases, entirely custom licensing makes sense, and we plan to be open to different arrangements when such cases present themselves.

So is this the final, definitive license model? No. We're still taking feedback and will continue to tweak and/or change this based on what you tell us of your needs.

Please tell us what you think of all this! Do you have better ideas, or foresee any problems for us, or for you? Is it too complicated? Is your use case not covered? If you have any feedback, please reach out to us on our Discord, or at howtonotstarve@pangui.io.

Your feedback and ideas have already been invaluable, and we look forward to hearing more from all of you.

All the best,

Sirenix