Following Microsoft’s lead, in early 2015, we decided to give back to the developer community in a major way. This was the year we decided to release Essential Studio® for free under our groundbreaking community license.
With the community license, individual developers were granted access to our entire suite for free. Under this license, you don’t just get a product download but full support and updates as well. It’s our way of helping those without funding get their projects underway.
This was an unprecedented move in the industry, as no other component vendor was giving away its products for free. This was especially risky for us, as users of this license would be getting almost $10,000 worth of free software. In the end, we decided not to focus on how much this would cost us. Instead, we wanted to focus on getting developers on the right track to making something great. We decided giving back wasn’t enough because lots of companies give back. We wanted to empower. So far, over 45,000 users have been empowered by the community license.
We’ve since sweetened this deal by adding our enterprise-level products to the license. It’s our way of helping small developers prepare for large projects — or getting them ready for enterprise-level work.
Have you built something as a hobby or even pushed a full release by using our community license? Let us know in the comments; we’d love to update this post by linking to your release.
