Since 2005, when my the company I worked at first starting using Confluence and JIRA, I have been an active participant in the Atlassian community. This included developing and supporting open source plugins in my spare time, creating issues, and participating in discussions. Atlassian products have matured and expanded over the years and so have the plugins I have worked on! The plugins have improved over the years with the help of the user and development community in the spirit of open source software.
While I have strived to provide a reasonable level of support over the years, the time demands have increased significantly beyond the ability to be handled by spare time. This has been caused by the expanded user base, the increased complexity of plugin development for the products, and the rate of releases coming from Atlassian. Moreover, many plugins are critical components of company's business processes and work environment. Many of these companies are looking for secure and dependable suppliers.
Based on these facts and various discussions with Atlassian and customers, Bob Swift Software, LLC has been formed to commercialize a number of these plugins. The goal is to provide increased level of support, improved delivery time of improvements, and provide assurances on the continued and timely availability and testing of the plugins on future product releases. Bob Swift Software will continue to develop and support some open source projects as well. We will also follow Atlassian's policy of providing free software to open source projects and charitable organizations plus discounts for educational institutions.
What does this mean for existing users?
Current users can continue to use the existing open source software as is without a commercial license. When a commercial version of the software is available supporting the associated Atlassian product release, then support will only be available for the commercially licensed version. Companies are encouraged to buy licenses for those products they consider important for their business to ensure continued improvement and on going support as popularity of a plugin will help determine future enhancements and level of support.
Commercial plugins will be easy to purchase and maintain since they will use Atlassian Marketplace for consolidated license management and billing.
Other information