AMEE Open Source Policy

September 1, 2011

Summary

AMEE has adopted an open source approach from day one. Our approach ensures we leverage collaboration and best available technologies to efficiently deliver value to our customers and partners.

What is Open Source?

Open source is a licensing method for software that allows software developed by others to be used free of charge, and can bring about benefits such as harnessing the power of distributed peer review, improving transparency and trust, and enabling contribution to a community effort.

Why Does AMEE Have A Open Source Policy?

At AMEE we have a vision — Environmental Intelligence, Everywhere. To achieve this vision requires innovative thinking and collaboration. AMEE advocates an open-source approach to software licensing because it helps enable the innovative thinking and collaboration we desire. Our open source approach enables us to execute our mission and vision more quickly and confidently. It does this by making the way our software works transparent, which in turns allows our clients (and other interested parties) to provide feedback, find bugs and suggest improvements more easily. It also enables our clients and partners to gain access to our software in order that they may innovate more quickly, thereby helping us achieve our vision of Environmental Intelligence, Everywhere.

Why Is Open Source Important Our Customers?

Our open source approach enables us to deliver customers better, more secure products more efficiently and flexibly. Our approach means customers benefit from AMEE leveraging collaboration and best available technologies.

Specifically, customers realize the following key benefits:

  • Faster time to market;
  • Lower total cost of development and maintenance;
  • Ease collaboration with our internal development team; and
  • Foster collaboration with our clients, partners and others interested in using the AMEE Platform.

We do not require our customers to adopt open source. We ensure that any software they develop using our open source components does not need to itself be open source thereby protecting any commercial interests.

What Is AMEE’s Open Source Policy?

Wherever we release software as open source, AMEE will license the software under the BSD 3-Clause License. We have selected this license because:

  • It allows anyone to use our software completely free of charge;
  • It does NOT require that any extensions, modifications or changes to that software be contributed back to AMEE or the community (although we welcome contributions); and
  • It does NOT require that any software based on, or built with, our open source software be open source itself — clients, partners and others are permitted to use our open source software to develop closed source applications, and charge for access to these applications, if desired.

What Software Does AMEE Release as Open Source?

Consistent with our approach, we have released as open source the following parts of the AMEE technology stack:

What’s not open?

We have put a great deal of work into aggregating data and organizing it in a useful structure. While we don’t think it would be easy, for commercial reasons we don’t want to expose this and risk another firm copying AMEE. We have also found through experience that the greatest benefits from open source collaboration are found in the software built on top of the database structure. Thus, we have decided not to open source the following parts of the AMEE stack:

  • Platform code
  • Internal database structure
  • Calculation algorithms
  • Privately licensed content

Frequently Asked Questions

Open source is often a new topic for both our customers and partners. We’ve noticed that several concerns, often unfounded, come up repeatedly. We’ve listed these concerns below and explain how we address them. However we’re always willing to discuss directly so feel free to contact us!

  • Is my data still private?
    Open source does not mean your data is freely available to all AMEE customers. We protect your data, you own it, and nobody else can see it.
  • Is AMEE secure?
    Our platform performance is held to the highest security standards. Open source does not provide access to enable one to alter or damage AMEE’s platform and therefore does not pose a security risk.
  • Is open-source software enterprise grade?
    There is a common myth that open source software is not enterprise ready. Enterprises regularly use open source software from a variety of vendors such as customer relationship management, web conference, and business analytics providers to name just a few.
  • Does this mean its all free?
    Open source does NOT mean customers can access our software for free. Rather, it means that we provide customers and partners access to certain parts of our technology so they can create better solutions or contribute to improving AMEE solutions.
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