Index Data  >  Technologies  >  Open Source

Free software -- with support

At Index Data, we originally began to license our software for free because we were in the business of working with standardised network protocols. We reasoned that if good tools were available for free, then more people would implement the standards, and they might implement them better. This, in turn, would allow us to write more interesting applications on top of those standards.

We're not religious about the issue, however, and, like many of our colleagues, we respect and support other people's rights to produce closed-source products if they feel that suits their business model and the needs of their customers.

Our low-level protocol toolkits are generally distributed under a very liberal "BSD-like" license which asserts our copyright, but allows any and all reuse, including commercial, closed-source applications.

A few of the higher-level packages (eg. Zebra) are licensed under the GPL. Check the license specifications of each package and contact us if you're in doubt. Other forms of licensing can be negotiated for commercial purposes.

Finally, we offer optional, professional support arrangements on all of our software packages - it is a myth that free software is unsupported software.