The Maverick Synergy Java SSH API uses a dual licensing mechanism to provide both commercial and open source versions of the API. The open source license we have chosen is the LGPL as we feel this protects our rights as the copyright holder requiring that any changes made are released under the same license but is also liberal enough to allow commercial use of the open source software.
Our business partners demand fast and effective resolution of issues, and as such, we provide this with a range of different paid-for support arrangements. To maintain the balance between these demands and the ability for the open source community to utilize our APIs effectively in their open source projects we have devised a release strategy that ensures our partners can receive hotfix updates on-demand and that the open source project remains active with regular contributions from our developers.
We, therefore, undertake to maintain an open source version of the software for the community and a separate private branch for our partners that will be available under a commercial license agreement.
To ensure both versions of the product remain the same, and features and bug fixes do not drift apart over time, we commit to pushing changes back to the community version at fixed intervals. This policy will ensure that our partners' interests and investments in us are protected but at the same time ensures that the community has an active, regularly maintained product too.
