Your voice was heard. A couple of weeks was too long to wait for unequivocal clarification of our licensing issues. I asked the team to make resolving the confusion our #1 priority and they have delivered.

As promised, I want to be fully transparent with you given some of the confusion between what’s “free” versus what’s “open source” and what you can or cannot do with the free (and open source) products.

We have made what we think are all the necessary changes to the App Explore license agreement to make it very, very clear between what’s open source and free, what you have to pay for, and we removed any ambiguous or onerous legalese.

I’m posting below the “redline” to the current agreement with our proposed changes so you can see them before we make them official. Our current plan is to make this version of the license (for App Explore package) become official on Wednesday, October 10, 2012.

I welcome your feedback. Please leave any in the comments of this post.

Non-lawyer changelog for the agreement:

• Made it very clear that Titanium SDK, Alloy, Titanium CLI are not specifically covered under the App Explore license agreement and are covered under the Apache Public License, version 2.
• Made it clear that the Titanium Studio product (which you download) is free to use under the App Explore license, but not open source.
• Cleaned up the license agreement to disambiguate the difference between the open source products and the non-open source products.
• Made it clear that you can fork any of the products under the Apache licenses and do what you want, provided you comply with that license.
• Made it clear that the apps that you build under the App Explore license have no financial obligation to Appcelerator.
• Made it clear that the apps that you build will not contain ads (unless you specifically grant us permission by using a module or another third-party ad service integrated into Titanium).
• Made it clear that we reserve the right to serve ads in Titanium Studio (for example, on the dashboard to advertise a popular module in the Marketplace).
• Made it clear that you can turn analytics off in your application at any time and clarified that you must comply with any applicable privacy laws depending on your own legal jurisdiction.
• Made it clear that under the agreement, we have no obligation to provide the licensee with support, indemnification or warranty.

Titanium SDK Release 2.1.3 fixes more than 50 issues in the iOS and Android platforms, specifically targeting iOS 6 and iPhone 5. Highlights include:

• iOS — Support for iOS 6 and XCode 4.5.
• iOS — Addition of new API for authorization to access contacts.
• iOS — iOS 6-specific fixes for issues surrounding labels, text fields, audio and layout.

For a complete list of fixes, new APIs, and deprecated APIs, see the release notes.

Download and Installation

For More Information

The Release 2.1 documentation page has been updated to reflect changes in Release 2.1.3, as well as the usual documentation updates and corrections.

Note When loading the updated page for the first time, you may need to clear your browser cache. If the documentation page takes more than a few seconds to load, clear your cache and reload the page.

We’ve heard from many of our developers that our pricing, licensing and T&C is confusing. I’m sorry for the confusion and anxiety this has caused you. You’ve raised many valid points, and highlighted areas where we need to do a better job. So we will change these. Based on your feedback, we are right now working furiously on some big product and pricing changes, as well as cleaning up some of the confusion in the license agreement. It will take us a few weeks to roll out these changes formally, but in the meantime, I would like to assure you that:

• We will not charge for development that happens under the App Explore license (i.e., the free version). There is no financial obligation if you build an app for yourself or a client on the App Explore license.
• We will not contact our developers’ clients and ask them to purchase a license — at least not without the client explicitly requesting contact from us or if you ask us for help with a customer.

[That last caveat may sound like bullshit hedging to some of you. I hear you that you want me to unequivocally say that we will never contact your clients under any circumstances, but I cannot do that as we do receive inbound requests from companies who would like us to contact them to discuss support, SLAs, etc. I totally understand if you are suspicious of our intentions right now given that our sales reps may have called you and your clients in the past with confusing messages about when you or they need to pay and why, and I’m truly sorry for this. I promise you that we are cleaning this up. ]

• We cannot pull an App from the App Store and would never do that if we could.
• We will not serve ads in your apps without your permission.

We also realize that there is confusion about what is open source versus what is free. Currently, Titanium SDK is open source under the Apache License.

The following products are not open source, but they are free to use (with some restrictions on usage, for example, certain amount of usage on ACS storage) under the App Explore license: Titanium Studio, as well as the App Explore levels of ACS and Analytics.

We care very deeply about providing quality free products for the community. This has been important to Nolan and me since we started Appcelerator, and always will be. We will continue to provide a free version of Titanium and more free products in the future (such as the new, upcoming Titanium CLI and Alloy). Look for some exciting announcements coming about this in the next few weeks.

We’ve always strived to be transparent: we develop a majority of our products in public view on github and under an open source license, we have a public bug tracking JIRA, we have an open Q&A forum on our community website and we have a public Wiki for documentation, among many other activities. However, sometimes we will slip up, and the only way we will get better is if you continue to tell us and help hold us accountable. So thank you for reaching out and expressing your concerns.

One of our company core values is “Be Humble.” I like to tell our team that “Be Humble” means humility in both success AND failure. We are humbled by our mistakes and committed to fix them. Look for more formal communication to our pricing, T&C and licensing agreements coming in the next few weeks. We’re working hard on them right now and need some time to make sure we get it right.