Free Excelsior JET Licenses
If you have developed a free, non-commercial Java application, you may obtain a free Excelsior JET Pro license in exchange for some cross-promotion, which can be as simple as a link to the Excelsior JET home page from your download page.
Qualified projects
To determine whether your project automatically qualifies for a free license, answer these two questions:
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Is your project public and non-commercial in nature?
Your project must not directly or indirectly support any commercial efforts. For details, see the FAQ section below. - Does your project have a publicly available Web site that meets the basic quality standards?
Even if you have not answered "Yes" to both questions, your project may still qualify, so do not hesitate to apply.
How to apply
To apply, simply email us a brief summary of your project and the anticipated benefits from your use of Excelsior JET. Make sure to include the project URL.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does my project have to be open-source?
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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?
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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?
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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?
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Yes, absolutely.
- I use third party ads to support my project. Can I qualify for a free license?
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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...
- My product has a free version and a paid version. Can I still qualify?
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See the previous answer.
