Effective today, we're changing our licensing model from Commercial-only to a Free-and-Commercial hybrid, and I'm very happy and excited to announce this.

We streamlined our previous three commercial editions (Standard, Professional and Enterprise) into two (Basic and Ultimate) and added a freeware edition called Lite. Starting today, each of our current and future SharePoint add-ons, Web Parts, tools and solutions will always be also offered in an unlimited freeware Lite edition, no strings attached:

• this edition will have no expiry date, no user, site or server limits;
• and once we have accepted a feature or functionality into the Lite edition, we will never ever relocate it into the commercial higher tiers at a later point.

You've heard correctly; ROXORITY now offers a free Filter Web Part (FilterZen, and it's amazing!), a free User Profiles Web Part (PeopleZen scales incredibly well to 1000s of profiles!), a free List data CSV Export feature (ExportZen does a really good job has a bright future) and even a free version of UploadZen, our order-of-magnitude-better bulk upload solution for Sharepoint.

There's more!

In addition, we now offer a 100% discount on the Ultimate edition to registered, non-profit, non-governmental charitable foundations, and a 33% academic discount on all editions to certified higher-education institutions.

Developers, content managers and site designers can continue to prototype and test their solutions with our tools for free, because no matter what licenses you have or haven't installed, in all Site Collections with 10 users or less you always get Ultimate functionality. This was previously known as the Micro license but that behavior is now automatic, no need to install a license file. We like simplifying things!

Why did we do it?

The SharePoint open source freeware ecosystem is as diverse and rich as the commercial one, only more so. We wanted to contribute to that environment. As we take great pride in the powerful, flexible and highly customizable capabilities that we offer, we also wanted to extend the reach of what we and many users believe to be great software (and which will only get better over the next few years). As we go from great to insanely-great, we don't want to leave out those users who just need the simple, basic variants of our solutions at this point, are under budget constraints, who'd prefer commercial-grade support but are for various reasons inclined to evaluate mostly free solutions.

Once you have built some pretty advanced software, you just really want to share it. For a commercial software vendor, that means: making sure we have an offering for every budget, including zero-budget.

Existing customers: we have just upgraded you to Ultimate for free!

Have we got news for you! Because we made changes to our licensing, your existing licenses might yield unexpected results the next time you upgrade your ROXORITY software. That would be unacceptable.

The solution that would most delight you (because now you get even more return on your investment) and us (because it is the simplest) is to upgrade all of your licenses to Ultimate licenses, at no additional cost. You're welcome!

The emails with all the details will go out to all of you in the course of the next 24-48 hours.