Free Excelsior JET Licenses for Non-Commercial Use

If you have developed a free, non-commercial application in Java and would like to optimize and package it with Excelsior JET for the benefit of your end users, read on!

We are interested in our product being associated with quality Java application software. If you have created a masterpiece, we want to sponsor your developments by providing you with a free Excelsior JET license and doing some cross-promotion, e.g. exchange links and so on.

How to apply

To qualify for a free license, your project must:

Be non-commercial in nature, that is, not directly or indirectly support any commercial efforts.
Have a publicly available Web site
Have an established user base, or a beta testers community if you are yet to launch v1.0

To apply, email us a brief summary of your project and your intended use of Excelsior JET.

If you have any questions, please check out the FAQ section below.

Featured project: JAlbum

JAlbum is a gallery software that makes web albums from your digital images. So far over 7 million photo albums have been published with JAlbum.

"We love Java for its platform independence, the language itself and the API, but the users discovering JAlbum these days don't even know if they have Java installed on their computer. We therefore see great benefits of providing JAlbum precompiled and packaged for Windows through Excelsior JET. We use this packaging as the default download alternative so users don't need to care. I am amazed how the Excelsior JET team has managed to compress the whole Java functionality + our application in half the size of the Sun JRE alone, and it works 100%."

David Ekholm
JAlbum Project Founder

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my project have to be open-source?

Not at all. Authors of free closed-source software are welcome to apply for sponsorship, whereas commercial open-source projects are welcome to purchase a commercial license.

Do open-source projects qualify automatically?

No. For instance, many commercial companies finance open-source projects in order to generate revenue. They can surely afford a commercial Excelsior JET license if they decide it would add value.

Is the Excelsior JET license GPL-compatible?

Unfortunately, no. Excelsior JET includes the Java SE API source code licensed from Sun Microsystems under SCSL Commercial Use license, which is not GPL-compatible. So even releasing our own code under the GPL won't help. LGPL is fine however.

We suggest you to release the natively compiled binary under a different license, pointing out that the source code is available under the GPL. You would however need the consent of all contributors.

Is accepting donations considered non-commercial?

Yes, absolutely.

I use third party ads to support my project. Can I qualify for a free license?

It depends on the amount of revenue generated from those ads, though we admit it is difficult to draw the line. We'd say that a project is non-commercial if the revenues generated from ads do not go into authors' pockets, but are spent on the project - hosting, equipment, etc., or donated to charity.

Then, we do not like adware, but a reasonable amount of relevant advertisement on the project's Web site is OK.

What about the shareware authors? My product is yet to break even...

Many authors have found that offering a natively compiled version of their application increases both the number of downloads and the conversion rate. So if you are serious about your shareware business, but want to avoid the up front payment, consider our Lease-To-Own subscriptions.

Another option is to assist us in the promotion of our product, if you have some spare time. Email us for details.

My product has a free version and a paid version. Can I still qualify?

See the previous answer.