The Gluon team today announces the opening of the Gluon Store. A huge amount of our effort in the past few months has been working with our executive team and marketing gurus to organize the two offerings that are in our store starting today, as well as build out the backend infrastructure for subscriptions and license management.
Firstly, Gluon Mobile licenses are now available for sale. We have created four tiers of license, with varying degrees of service provided in each of them, but in all cases the underlying technology is the same for all developers. We’ve decided to offer Gluon Mobile as a subscription – this allows for us to provide top-notch support services for the life of the product (rather than start to lose money over the long run with lower sales but increased support costs). The way it works is that when your subscription is active, all software you release is valid and works without a nag screen at startup. Once the subscription lapses, you can continue to make releases of your product and no nag screen will be shown to users, as long as you only use versions of Gluon Mobile that were released while your subscription was active. If you use newer releases of Gluon Mobile (that were released after your subscription lapsed), the application will begin to show nag screens at startup again, until you choose to renew your subscription.
We agonized over this critical detail, as we wanted to strike a fair balance between encouraging payment for our products and not frustrating our customers. Our fallback approach was to make all applications start showing nag screens as soon as your subscription expired. We hope you appreciate the position we took, and we hope that everyone is happy with our pricing and offerings. Please contact us if you have any feedback.
Also – for those of you who purchase the Gluon Mobile licenses now, rest assured that all subscriptions will be reset to zero days from the date of our 1.0 release – which basically means you get a few more months for free! 🙂 We did this as we acknowledge that Gluon Mobile is still in having its rough edges polished, and we want to encourage early adoption of Gluon Mobile!
To go alongside the opening of the Gluon Store, we are also releasing a second developer preview of Gluon Charm. This release brings Gluon Charm closer to its first 1.0 release, and includes a number of bug fixes and improvements. Most importantly, it now has our licensing infrastructure in place, so that subscribers can immediately start releasing their software without the Gluon nag screen showing. As always, you can learn more about Gluon Charm on the product page, or for the developers among us, check out the latest developer documentation.
Secondly, we are offering commercial support for a number of open source projects that we are involved in developing. This commercial support ranges in price, and again, in terms of service offered. In general, the more that is paid, the more influence you have over the future development of these open source projects (by our talented team of engineers). In addition to this, we will offer frequent builds to subscribers such that they have access to the latest versions of these projects with the latest bug fixes and improvements included.
Our hope is that this service will be mutually beneficial – the community will benefit from your support, and we will benefit by keeping our development team fully utilized (there’s nothing worse than a bored developer)! 🙂
What’s Next?
Now that the Gluon Store is up and integrated into our backend systems, we are switching focus to getting Gluon Charm 1.0 released, and opening up our Gluon Cloud services as soon as practicable. You should expect more news about both of these topics very soon, especially with Gluon on its way to JavaOne in October.
Because our software is sold as a service, our intention is to be very agile in our releases going forward – Gluon Mobile will release regularly with new features and bug fixes. For users wanting to always be on the latest release, you can rely on your build tools to download the latest versions automatically – and they will work for as long as your subscription is valid.