[author: Alex]
Our business’s philosophy has always been the same: Be open, honest, and don’t treat your customers like criminals.
Photo © by Jon Jablonsky - creative commons - https://flic.kr/p/jVENR
These ideas grew close to me following my first encounter with DRM. I had purchased some eBooks a while back, and found myself unable to read them when I moved overseas. They were locked to my home country. Imagine being stopped at the airport’s immigration center, and being told it’s illegal to bring books into the country. Absurd, right?
The fight
Closed-source software, sneaky “contact sales” pages, enterprise vendor lock-in, and DRM struggles have pushed me to run my business a little differently.
A better approach
For us, we started by writing open source software, and contributing to existing projects. It wasn’t an afterthought or happy coincidence. Most of our work is open and accessible on GitHub, and can be used, tweaked, and improved by anyone. This also allows anyone to vet our work and continue using it even if we eventually stop improving it.
The “closed-source” software we write is licensed to our customers under a very liberal license (similar to MIT), allowing them to distribute the software as part of their virtual appliance, to view the code, and even modify it if needed. Once we’ve completed our work, the code belongs to them.
Pricing fairly
Our Jidoteki Meta appliance licensing is simple: pay a yearly license fee to obtain updates and new features, and use the software as much as you want, without us getting in the way. It’s a perpetual license, so you can keep using it even if you don’t renew your license. We didn’t even bother implementing an online license validation system, to protect our customer’s privacy (100% offline appliance), and because it’s a wasted effort.
Of course from a business perspective that may sound stupid. Yes, we’re leaving “money on the table”, but our thinking is simple:
If our customers don’t feel like they’re being screwed, perhaps they’ll be happy to continue using our services, and paying us for long-term support.
So far it’s been true, and we’re quite happy to have customers who agree and appreciate our support and philosophy. We don’t treat them like criminals, and rely on trust and working together to reach a common goal.
Pricing transparently
We decided to publicly display our fees on the Jidoteki website.
The “Setup” requires custom work for each customer, including the creation of automation scripts, init scripts, app integration, custom dependencies, and various edge-cases which occasionally surface. We also prepare our customer’s virtual appliance to be built automatically by Jidometa.
For "Jidometa”, it’s a yearly license fee to receive updates on the appliance, and to feel at ease knowing that you can build your appliances on your own time, and you never have to give us your source code.
For “Support”, we have a simple fixed monthly fee to help with all updates to your appliance, various issues, and most one-off requests; most can fit into that plan.
Benefits of Jidoteki
I won’t list all the benefits of Jidoteki and our service, but for our customers, the most important ones are:
If you’re looking to convert your current Installer-based software application over to a virtual appliance, or you have a SaaS that needs to really run on-premises, you should contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss your situation and see how we can work together.
Feel free to contact us on Twitter as well if you have any questions.