What is Liferay Portal EE?
Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE) is a commercial version of our market leading open source portal that provides an alternative for enterprises that face hindrances to adopting open source software. It is offered under a subscription service that further solidifies Liferay’s existing long-term support and maintenance offerings.
Unlike subscription options introduced for other open source products, Liferay Portal EE will not mean any changes for the community. Nothing changes except that companies needing long-term support over releases will now get it via a subscription and services contract.
Liferay Portal EE is made available via an Enterprise Subscription and Support contract that also provides business-critical service level agreements up to 365x24x1 hour phone support. In addition, a longer support period will provide stability and ongoing updates to organizations seeking to use a single stable version of the portal over several years. Support is provided by the Liferay engineering team located throughout the globe and is sold on a per server basis.
What is Liferay Portal Standard Edition and what will happen to Liferay Portal?
Apart from continued product enhancements---nothing! We are simply referring to the "standard", free community version as "Liferay Portal Standard Edition" (SE) in order to clearly differentiate between it and the new services-oriented Liferay Portal EE.
Those who don't need or want to commit to a services contract still have access to the latest features at absolutely no cost and no business risk. We will still continue to develop and innovate as we always have and provide maintenance releases for the most recent version of SE until the next release.
While new "Enterprise" versions of other open source products have meant losses for their community, the team here has worked hard to meet the needs of the enterprise market without sacrificing the needs of the community that make us what we are today.
Is Liferay Portal still open source?
Liferay Portal SE is still available under the MIT open source license at absolutely no cost and no risk.
While Liferay Portal EE will be available under a commercial license, users benefit from the same high quality features and innovation that results from our nine years of valuable user feedback from the community.
When will Liferay Portal EE be available?
We are currently in the final stages of hardening our EE. Our plan is to have Liferay EE available in early November.
Will I still have access to the source for Liferay EE?
Yes. We recognize that one of the other advantages of open source is the fact that developers can diagnose problems for themselves. In realizing this, we will continue to provide our source code for both Liferay EE and SE to developers.
Will there be features only accessible in Liferay EE and not Liferay SE?
No. Our commitment is to the community. Because of that, we realize that our community will be able to help us improve and test our product faster than we could ever do ourselves. Our focus is on making Liferay EE a stable, hardened version of our portal that is enterprise-ready, not on keeping functionality and features from the community.
