
Licensing of Titanium chaotic and unclear - Malcx
http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/142516/warning-licensing-of-titanium-chaotic-and-unclear-how-to-avoid-extortionate-fees
======
debacle
If one of my contractors or vendors ever contacted one of my clients and asked
for money I would drop them like a bad habit and never look back.

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pjzedalis
How does Appcelerator know who wrote the app? They see an app from a company
that offends their licenses, they contact the app owner (not necessarily the
developer). Seems legit to me.

~~~
Maxious
To be perfectly clear why this is downmodded, in the OP the developer's agency
is contacted and asks for clarification. Titanium then contacts his client
instead, it was not unnecessary do to so to contact the developer because they
were already corresponding.

~~~
pjzedalis
I guess I still don't understand how Appcelerator knew who the 'design agency'
was for the end client. Was the app advertised as being built in Titanium by
XYZ firm for ABC firm?

To follow up on my original point: The OP makes it seem like Appcelerator is
shaking them down after the fact (and breaking the licensing/pricing model
advertised for the product) yet there is no evidence of it. No one at
Appcelerator has confirmed this has happened nor has anyone else in the
comments had a similar issue.

It sounds more like Appcelerator reached out to upsell and it was
taken/communicated badly.

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jhaynie
We cannot pull an App from the App Store and would never do that if we could.
We are drafting a response. Please give us a few minutes to get something up
on the Q&A thread on our dev site.

[http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/142516/warning-
li...](http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/142516/warning-licensing-of-
titanium-chaotic-and-unclear-how-to-avoid-extortionate-fees)

Jeff (CEO of Appcelerator).

~~~
SpikeGronim
Thanks for responding here Jeff. The license on
<https://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile> is Apache 2.0. How can you
possibly ask for money from a developer who used Apache 2.0 code? It seems
like a black and white issue and that you are in the wrong. Please address the
Apache 2.0 license in your response.

~~~
prpatel
They don't. I've used Appcelerator for a number of projects that are now on
the App store(s) and haven't ever worried about this. The source code is on
Github under the Apache license as you mentioned. This is enough for me and my
lawyers to not worry about it.

~~~
erichocean
How does that possibly prevent their sales people from contacting your
customers and demanding $5000 or their app gets pulled?

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franze
the new "accepted answer" by jeff is a very very poor statement and makes me
to never touch Titanium ever. the statement didn't answer any part of the
question at all, and does nothing to clarify the situation. marketing speach
par exellence.

if they debug their code the same way they debug their business processes than
titanium would be the windows vista of mobile development frameworks.

~~~
prpatel
This is a quote from Jeff's response:

"To be crystal clear here, our intentions are that we will not charge for
development that happens under the “App Explore” product (i.e., the free
version). Usage of the Appcelerator platform (Titanium Mobile SDK, Titanium
Studio, Analytics and Cloud Services) at this level is permitted for all
applications, both commercial and free, with no financial obligation to
Appcelerator."

Again, APL code on Github. APL is a permissive and "biz friendly" license as
we all know.

~~~
pjzedalis
Appcelerator is open source for the sake of being considered open source. They
certainly are not in business to promote businesses using their open source
for free.

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programminggeek
I'm going to just say that I was never a fan of the way that Appcelerator
handled their framework from a tooling standpoint. To create an app, you have
to register it with them. It felt a bit creepy and unneeded if I wasn't going
to use any of their other services.

I'm much happier using Phonegap, Knockout, and Kendo Mobile to build apps.

~~~
ianhawes
Not only that, but each time the app launches, it phones home to Appcelerator.
This is by default, and you can only disable it by turning off Analytics in
the config.

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mikl
This sounds a bit fishy – how could Appcelerator even get an app pulled from
the app store? DMCA?

~~~
tszming
Maybe if the developer is not complying the opensource license [1]

e.g. Apache 2.0

>> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3966116/where-to-put-
open...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3966116/where-to-put-open-source-
credit-information-for-an-iphone-app)

~~~
adambenayoun
you could get an app pulled from the appstore using the DMCA - however if all
he did was using the appcelerator module which is licensed under a permissive
license (apache v2) - they would have no ground.

He's using something else there (perhaps their cloud services who are probably
free for free apps and costs money for paid apps).

~~~
protomyth
He has a bullet point that says: "Uses no Appcelerator services such as cloud
storage, analytics or push notifications"

~~~
adambenayoun
Right - my bad - missed that

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hhudolet
Waited for the official answer. It's bad, there's no answer. As someone who
started learning Titanium, this is really deal-breaker for me! Off to
phonegap, xamarin, or native ...

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driverdan
Sounds like a rogue / poorly trained sales person trying to earn their
commissions.

~~~
potatolicious
I never buy this line of reasoning - I've seen too many instances of this to
think otherwise. Every time a "rogue" sales person does something bad, it is
in response to tacit encouragement and acknowledgment of management, and have
been incentivized to behave badly.

The "rogue employee", in almost every single case I've ever seen, is just an
arms-length way for companies to behave badly while keeping plausible
deniability. See: Yelp.

~~~
j_s
I think the most recent discussion here about 'blame it on a rogue
employee/contractor/etc.' on HN revolved around Visa in Brazil:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396414>

The problem is, this strategy/dark pattern works.

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maxwin
I have been using Titanium for about a year. My past painful experience tells
me to never ever use Titanium again. It is buggy. Q & A support sucks big time
unless you pay for it. For any advanced project, you will absolutely need to
develop custom IOS modules. It will save you so much time and headache to just
use objective-C. (note: for simple projects, it might work for you)

~~~
mofle
I have the exact same experience. I've also reported more than 30 valid bugs,
none have been fixed... You wouldn't believe how buggy it is, and the docs are
just as bad.

Stay away - go native or phonegap

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borlak
Accepted Answer TL;DR:

[sorry] we will not charge for development that happens under the “App
Explore” product (i.e., the free version). Usage of the Appcelerator platform
(Titanium Mobile SDK, Titanium Studio, Analytics and Cloud Services) at this
level is permitted for all applications, both commercial and free, with no
financial obligation to Appcelerator. [sorry, we aren't transparent enough]

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onetwothreefour
"Having previously dabbled with Titanium in the past it seemed like the right
choice for rapid development and deployment of the app."

And that's where you made this a problem of your own making. :)

Anyone who uses these glorified WebView wrappers is doing themselves a
disservice.

~~~
pmjordan
_Anyone who uses these glorified WebView wrappers is doing themselves a
disservice._

I've never used it, but my understanding is that Titanium does _not_ run in a
web view. It compiles the JS down to C/ObjC, then that gets compiled to native
code by Apple's compiler.

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adambenayoun
I bet he is using some elements that are licensed under a commercial license
such as the appcelerator analytics and/or the enterprise element.

<http://www.appcelerator.com/plans-pricing>

It could also be that an appcelerator salesman was a bit aggressive on that
front but I bet this is not the case - 99% of the time, people are breaching
licenses without even knowing it.

~~~
ricardobeat
I think the Enterprise Extensions don't come with the SDK, and the analytics
starts with a free tier.

