One reason I enjoy working at Atlassian is that our founders highly encourage us to contribute to our community. For example, every employee receives five paid days annually to volunteer at a charity of his/her choice.
Another cool thing Atlassian does is donate free community licenses to non-profits (I'm planning to deploy Confluence for the faculty at my son's pre-school). And we support the open-source community with free Open Source Project Licenses. Community contribution is a core value for us so one way we measure our success is by looking at the number of community and open source licenses we generate.
That's why we're proud to announce today that we've given away just over 3,600 open source and community licenses. That's over 2,000 community licenses and over 1,600 open-source licenses. And the open-source projects using our software are a veritable list of who's who in open source:
- Apache, Hibernate use JIRA for issue tracking and project management;
- Adobe Flex, Mulesource use Confluence for collaboration and content management;
- MySQL, JA-Sig use FishEye for source-code repository insight;
- Apache Struts, The Spring Framework use Bamboo for continuous integration;
Non profits using our software include:
- Goodwill Industries International
- National Audubon Society
- The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society
- American Cancer Society
- Amnesty International
So why do we give our products away? I remember a venture capitalist once asking a former employer..."if your product were free would people use it?" With 3,600+ customers using our products for free, Atlassian passes that test (not that we've ever taken a dime of VC funding). At the end of the day we think it just makes good business sense to keep the people who create, evangelize and use our products healthy and happy. And sometimes it just feels good to give a little something back to the community.
While we celebrate 3,600 today, we know there are still thousands more out there that can benefit from Atlassian's software. Help us get the word out. If you know anyone who could benefit, encourage them to sign up for a free license at:
- http://www.atlassian.com/opensource for an open source project
- http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/community-license-request.jsp for a community license.
5 Comment(s)
Laura informs me that the total value of our free licenses equates to $10 million. That could buy a lot of Tesla Roadsters.
By Bill Arconati at November 12, 2008 5:42 AM
Thanks for all you do for the non profit sector!
By Peter at November 12, 2008 11:56 PM
Hello founders!
That is really nice policy of yours! More than nice. I prefer those companies, which are treating values at the right place..
Since you know, how far could go a project if it has got the community stream and does not require those dollars spent on project software...
I am just wondering, when will you realize, that there are some special parts of the world, where a hosted version could serve huge communities needs. It might be also the role of some of your good partners, like Adaptivist.
But I (and there are more like me here) am wondering, wheter you give the chance, to apply some special policies like that - with the help of the regular marketing effect, that you probably do need in some parts of Europe..
Thanks for doing good things, not only good software,
Csaba
By Madarász Csaba at November 19, 2008 5:27 AM
As a recipient of several Atlassian non-profit licenses I have to say a big thanks. I was stunned to realize how many others are benefiting from your fantastic products in the non-profit world. Thanks very much for this progressive policy. I sing the praises of Atlassian tools everywhere I go..or at least to the nerdy places I go.
By bryan kennedy at November 21, 2008 3:32 PM
Add us to the list of satisfied non-profit customers: The Society of Exploration Geophysicists (www.SEG.org). We're happily using JIRA, Bamboo, and Confluence!
Keep up the outstanding work!
By Matt Hinkle at March 24, 2009 4:46 AM