Hi Nicholas,
there must be a misunderstanding about XWiki SAS’ offers. Currently ALL paying extensions are included in all XWiki Support contract from “silver” level. When compared with Confluence, XWiki Support at bronze level (without extension support) is at least half price compared to confluence support (and even less than half for high number of users), and XWiki support at silver level (with extensions) is at a similar price as Confluence and just a few Confluence extensions will again double the price of Confluence. Also XWiki Support is a much “closer” support than what is gotten with Confluence support. To get some high level enterprise support, the additional pricing for Confluence are 10-50k just for that on top of the licence.
Our goal with paying extensions are not to change our pricing conditions in any way towards our support customers which are our partners and helping us finance the XWiki software development team. Our goal is to try to get some more partners that will help us. There is a difficulty to make companies that sell their own products (with their own proprietary rights) that the open source world will only work if there are companies paying to get people working on the products they use. Currently many companies are taking open source for granted without fully understanding how the model works.
I’d like to point out that in this process, all our paying extensions still have all their source code as open source under the same licence. We just don’t provide them as free easy to install packages. It is still possible to have other parties packaging them for themselves or others.
By proposing paying extensions and keeping our core product fully open source and free we believe we have the right balance which on one side allows to bring up the financing aspect with prospects and customers and not make them believe it can work with everything being free, pay our developers, and on the other side continue to build open source software which at XWiki is our main goal.
In any case, as a support customer, do talk to our support team about the paying extensions. You have access to all of them. Our support has started a campaign to directly inform customers.
Ludovic