TLDR; a discount model to make enterprise technology accessible to smaller organizations.
Larger enterprises tend to have correspondingly large IT budgets and a willingness to spend on technology that will drive their businesses forward.
As such, technology vendors are most likely to generate sustainable revenues by pricing their offerings for the enterprise. This unfortunately tends to price out the smaller organizations that could also benefit from this technology.
If the technology vendors provide discounts for those smaller organizations, this could significantly increase their user base and, since people tend to move around over the course of their careers, this could also drive more long-term adoption in additional enterprises.
Many vendors have offered "single step discounts" giving organizations up to a certain size a 100% discount but then requiring them to pay full price when crossing that threshold.
We've come up with a multi-step discount model that smoothens out that transition as described in this announcement and, following Dylan Beattie's video about licensing models in the .NET ecosystem, have decided to open-source it so that everybody can reuse, mix, and modify it without worry of copyright infringement.
Our hope is that this will serve as a useful building block for any open-source project looking to find sustainability through commercialization while continuing to serve the smaller organizations in their community.
The following vendors provide a Small Business Program:
The contents of this repository are published under the Creative Commons BY license.
Please attribute with:
Small Business Program is licensed from Particular Software under CC-BY.
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