Per developer licensing

VistaDB has always been a per developer seat license. This will not change, and we will never charge royalties on the runtime engine for your applications. These are basic tenets that I will not allow to be changed. All customers will always have free access to the support forums, and all new customers will always receive priority support free for their first 30 days.

Subscription Model Pricing

We are adding a subscription model pricing to the VistaDB 3 product line. A subscription will grant you the following benefits:

• Unlimited priority support for the duration of your subscription
• Product enhancement updates are included free
• Any new engines or add-ons to the product are included free (with the exception of the VistaDB Server which is a separate product)
• Access to development versions of patches before they become public
• Access to older downloads and patches
• Access to a subscriber only forum

This means with a valid subscription you receive all updates for free (minor and major), new engines, and components for free as a part of your subscription. Take a look at the roadmap for things we have planned for the upcoming year. Things like full text search and the LINQ provider will be major upgrades to the existing engines. All subscribers will receive those for free. The only exception to this rule will be the VistaDB Server which will be a separate license. I am already anticipating the question of a release from 3 to 4, and if that would be covered. The answer is YES. When you subscribe to VistaDB you are committing to us, and we in turn will commit to you. What about existing users? All current users will continue to receive free updates until the 3.1 release. At that point they will have to upgrade, or purchase a subscription and get the upgrades for free. I will be making a very special offer for each current owner to upgrade to a subscription.

Do you need the absolute latest releases?

Do you often find yourself needing the LATEST build, even if it is unstable? In many companies they call this the beta build, or development build, or some other name. What it means is a build that has not undergone all the same testing as a full release, but includes fixes ASAP. Many times during heavy development you need access to some new feature or fix quickly, but after your product release you only want stable builds. Sometime in April we will begin to offer two builds to subscribers. 

Stable – Production Code

Stable will be the latest full release build – it will have to pass all of the unit tests and regression tests. Expect these builds to come out about every 3-4 months or as security concerns happen.   

Development – Rapid release

Development will be all incremental updates and fixes by the developers very quick. I expect this release to be something like every 2 weeks, or whenever a new major bug fix goes into the code. No more “can you send me a build with that fix in it” questions in the forum. If you want to help test the Development build, great! But it will be called that, and everyone will know it up front. In order to use the development builds you will be required to have a current subscription. I personally have always liked having that ability when I am in heavy development or prototyping of a new project to look at the development releases and see what new features may be included in the future that I may want to use now. 

Do you need access to the source?

Some companies need the source to third party tools or components, or they need a service level agreement and insurance in the event the company goes out of business. I have run into this a few times when I was consulting and it is a pain to do. Source code escrow agreements can cost you thousands of dollars in legal time, and then hundreds in the license itself. Banking, health care, safety systems, security systems, etc all need to have these agreements in place or they will not use a product. No matter how good it is. We are going to start offering a Source Edition in April. This edition will include the full retail product and all the source code to build the engine, SQL parser, etc. The Source Edition will be sold on an annual subscription basis.

What are the terms of the source license?  This is not open source. Basically you have to agree not to release the code in any way, and not to build a database product that directly competes with us.

If you want to use the Engine to build an embedded database engine for a custom application that is fine. But you may not build an SDK or API that is to be resold. You also may not relicense the source to anyone and agree to keep the source secure within your organization. 

Do you have to share your changes back with us? No. You can if you like, but it is not required.

Why is a subscription for the source offered? This product is under rapid development. If you only need a onetime snapshot of the source for legal compliance (you are embedding 3.0 in your product and will never upgrade to 3.1) you may not need the subscription.  Everyone else will probably want the subscription. The subscription gives you priority access to source updates for security, features, optimizations, etc. 

We plan to publish the code to partners on a bi-monthly basis so you have a scheduled way to integrate with your own custom codebase if you want.  Think of it like “patch Tuesday” from Microsoft. Everyone knows it, and prepares for it.  We are building a subscription application that will be given to each subscriber.  This application will automatically compare what you have on disk to our current code and checkout the code for you. This update process can also be run manually.

The future is so bright; we’ve got to wear shades…

I honestly believe you are going to see some just amazing things come out of the VistaDB team in the coming months. We are extremely excited about the product and the ideas we are generating internally for the future.  

-Jason EDIT - I did not mean to publish this until I had more information live for existing customers and what it means to you.  It is a good thing, not a bad thing. I wrote a brief announcement on the site about existing 3.0 customers and the subscription.