sorry but I don't understand why there is still no announcement to inform the interested parties.

It's available now, but currently only with Liferay published apps.

Hi,

What is legal tax document, that is needed for register a european company?

Thanks in advance.

You need to supply a Employer Identification Number.

You will also need to supply a document that certifies that your company is in fact a company by providing one of the following legal tax documents:

• Articles of Incorporation
• Business License
• Certificate of Formation
• Charter Documents
• Operating Agreement
• Partnership Papers
• Reseller or Vender License

I haven't seen any legal documents at Marketplace. Which country and state law is going to apply to items in Marketplace ? CA law on liability? I, also, haven't seen any license information on each portlet. Is it going to be added? There's also a word "free" being used. That this mean I can download and distribute it "freely" because this is an open source project?


I like the graphical design of the site but the site seems to be lacking "legal" information that's necessary in all businesses. Hope liferay.com will get some lawyers to make this site more professional business-like.

Hi Hitoshi,

The governing law of the apps are going to be determined by the third-party licensors. In our case, the agreement that our apps are licensed under are governed by California law. As for the word "free", you probably know as well as I do that the English language doesn't distinguish between "free" as in speech or "free" as in beer. In the case of our apps, it actually means the latter.

Sorry, one point of clarification:
In our case, the agreement that our EE apps are licensed under are governed by California law. Our CE apps, of course, are provided under an open source license.

It's kind of confusing when the same word is used to mean 2 different things especially since open source community has strongly been trying to tell users that "free" means "free" as in speech and open source does not mean $0 dollars. I think using "free" to denote $0 in a open source site is going to be a step backward. I think most of people already using liferay.com site knows this but I think Marketplace is more geared more to end users who may not know the difference. Is it possible to change the word to something else?

It's kind of confusing because I think you've put the same terms in EE portlets and CE portlets.
From your reply, I think liferay.com only wants CA laws to apply to EE portlets? How about those "free" EE portlets?

Will developers be able to upload there own terms of agreements so purchasers will be able to see the terms before they purchase the portlet?

Interestingly enough, we had the $0.00 price initially during development. It wasn't until the very end, while we were in our final phase of user acceptance testing, that it was determined that the word "Free" resonated better with the regular end user.

Developers can upload their own customer end user license agreement (EULA) or use a default one supplied by Liferay. Generally speaking, I've been thinking we could probably make it clearer as to what EULA is being applied to the app before the user gets to the purchase page, so we'll probably be adding a link on the app details that takes the user to the applicable EULA. So hopefully that will help to prevent confusion with respect to the word "Free". Worst case, we just go back to using $0.00.

Oh regarding our EE apps, those are actually licensed differently from our CE apps, with EE apps being downloadable for subscribers.

"Free" sounds better until the user finds that not everything is $0.00. Then the user complains. :-)



I'm going to take that as even when the EE portlet is $0.00, it's covered under the EE license and support agreement.

In my opinion Liferay team is right. I think the pattern "Free" that appears on a App on the Apple Store, for instance, means that your credit card won't be charged when you download the App. That's it; period. If the app needs a premium account to work well, for example, and though needs to be paid is another story and the pitfall there happens if the company doesn't offer a limited free or trial account option.
A lot of companies adopted the "Lite" pattern (successful one) so they offer this Lite version for FREE and the complete one for the real price.

In my opinion, Liferay is right and should keep just following the well estabilished UX patterns as Marketplace is not something new and undiscovered.

Tiago, I think you're mixing apples and oranges here. Apple is not an open source company - you can read Richard Stallman's remark about the company. Shareware vendors and proprietary software vendors offer "lite" version, but open source company offers $0.00 community version which can be freely used and distributed.

The defacto meaning of "free" in an open source community is freedom of speech.

Well, I still think that if we are talking about "Marketplace" we are talking about comercial transaction.
So if you think in terms of UX, when the user clicks on a link called "Marketplace", one of the facts that comes to his brain is something like "If i'm going to the Market, I need my wallet" and even though Liferay is not Apple, it can take advantage of this particular Apple's business model - app store.
But, if the intention of Liferay is to offer a different and new App distribution business model, not based on comercial transaction, focused on OpenSource community, in my opinion, the name Marketplace is not a good one. When I saw marketplace for the first time, I thought that it'll be a place that software developers and business managers would go to find solutions, despite they were free, opensource, monthly paid, etc. That would be a particular detail of the App.

Maybe I misunderstood what was the porpuse of Liferay Marketplace, but I thought that it was intended to offer the same (or almost the same) experience (and UX) of Apple Store and Google Play with the same (almost) objectives.

@Tiago I definitely agree. I think Marketplace is a great evolution inside Liferay.com Business Model (as well as generally "app" one): We all believe in the added value we developers and IT business men are gaining having such a compelling platform upon to base our businesses. Sure, Liferay has to surf the Apple marketplace model to gain the most out of it and if this is some "heratical" concept compared to the "pure" Open Source Philosofy, what's the problem?
Liferay commitment to provide the leading open source portal technology to the market and to the open source community is not debatable as for now (IMHO, obviously), but Liferay.com is not a charity company, they have to grow their business to be competitive and what's wrong with that? If their business is growing so it is our own.
I would prefer to have some confusion about free and 0$ labeling rather than having a buggy or instable releases, because I, as a company, am relying part of my business upon Liferay Portal's leading edge features, but having these is not for free. Lot of people are working hard to make this happen and this is not for free nor 0$, so, it is wellcome and I can agree some open source debate about that, and surely Liferay.com will react to this the best way they will, but the most important thing is to make this model as much sustainable as possible to make the platform most robust, stable and featured.
regards,
davide

I completely agree with Tiago and Davide, and frankly speaking I was not expecting any free/no obligations applications to be published on the MarketPlace.
There is a danger that it is going to be fully polluted by Hello World / Click Me - style applications, instead of having a limited (initially) list of robust business applications, developed, maintained and supported by responsible vendors.

I think you guys are digressing from the original topic here. I'm not talking about it MarketPlace should have $0.00 or non-$0.00 plugins available, I'm just talking about the usage of word "free" at Liferay.com site because it denotes 2 different things and can confuse users like you guys are right now.

"Free" in open source community is used in something like freedom of speech. "Free" in commercial transaction is used to mean $0.00. Liferay.com is a commercial open source company (COSS) which means Liferay.com does a commercial transaction with development based on open source community model. There's nothing wrong with that because I think most of us here is in it too.

However, the point is if we should use a WORD that can cause confusion and create argument. From the look of it, you guys are getting confused too because you seems to be talking about whether commercial open source is good or bad. I'm proposing it's better to change the word "free" just so we don't get into this kind of argument because it really hinders commercial open source market.



Liferay is an open source project. I don't think it should limit who and what others do. That is, the choice should be "free" (as in freedom of speech :-) ).

Nevertheless, I think you've brought up a good point. It may be good to have a facet search facility to filter by price range and developer and have category for sample and tutorial.

Excited that Marketplace is finally here!



I want to second Hitoshi's suggestions above. Once developer uploads are allowed search and filter capabilities will be very helpful. It would be nice right now to be able to view only CE or EE within the defined categories.

Is there any way to know the state of registration of your company?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Luis,

We'll be going through and accepting registrations next week. Stay tuned. We'll notify your company if there are any missing parts.

Thanks Brian.

We are waiting to read / see confirmation, to bring in this fantastic initiative