FAQ - Licensing

Is there any cost associated with using Orbeon Forms?

Professional Edition (PE) builds are available through PE Subscription plans. Further commercial support is available with Dev Support plans.

Community Edition (CE) builds are available free of charge whether your use it to build open source or commercial applications.

The complete source code to Orbeon Forms CE is available free of charge and under real open source terms. The source code to Orbeon Forms PE is available to subscription customers on demand.

With the open source code, you are free as you please to:

  • extend the platform
  • build applications on top of the platform

Note however that if you make changes to the existing Orbeon Forms code, you are bound by the terms of the LGPL license, which requires you to redistribute changes to the open source community when you distribute your application.

You sent a license for orbeon Forms 4.6. Can I use Orbeon Forms 4.0 with that license?

Yes, a license generated for a given version will work with previous versions of the software as well.

You sent a license for orbeon Forms 4.4. Can I use Orbeon Forms 4.6 with that license?

It depends:

  • If your license file has a non-blank subscription-end date, then you can upgrade to any Orbeon Forms version published before that date. In other words, you can upgrade to any version of Orbeon Forms published while your subscription is active and your license file reflects that.
  • If your license file has a blank subscription-end but has a non-blank version, then you can upgrade to any version up to and including the version specified. NOTE: Only the first two version numbers are checked. If your license file says 4.4, then you can use 4.4.1, for example. In other words, minor updates are always allowed.
  • If your license file has neither a non-blank subscription-end nor a non-blank version, then there are no restrictions to which version of Orbeon Forms you can use.

The above is valid as long as the license hasn't expired, if it has an expiration date specified.

In practice, the Orbeon Forms licenses we produce typically have the following features:

  • PE Basic license
    • have an expiration date
    • don't have a version specified
    • don't have a subscription-end date specified
  • PE Silver and PE Gold licenses
    • don't have an expiration date
    • have a version specified
    • have a subscription-end date specified

Will my license expire and cause the software to stop working?

  • Production licenses don't expire.
  • Non-production Basic licenses (as well as the older Dev licenses) do expire.

You can check whether there is an actual expiration by checking the expiration field of the license file.

What is the subscription-end field in the license file?

The subscription-end field is informative and indicates the end of the support subscription, when applicable.

What am I paying for when I acquire an Orbeon Forms PE Production subscription?

The first year, both:

  • a license to install and use the software
  • one year of support

The second and subsequent years:

  • additional years of support