Hi all,
we use CE in our company and plan to evaluate the new DXP free tier.
As far as I know, we cannot ask official Liferay partners for help, in case we have an issues, because Liferay partners may not do projects with DXP free tier.
Is that correct?
Best regards,
Rüdiger
Welcome RRN!
Yes you are correct, partners are not supposed to use the free tier just like they were not supposed to use CE.
So, hypothetically, if an organization with a dozen years experience with Liferay were to become a partner, they would essentially be cut off from supporting the community? That seems like such an odd thing. So, a Partner would be prevented from contributing community/free tier features then also?
Sorry if this draws attention in a way the question wasn’t intended. I was reading the question as “can a Partner organization (or an employee of a partner organization) provide help to (me) as a Community / Free Tier user”. The next layer of the question could be ‘under a contracted support agreement’ or something like that, but it wasn’t stated explicitly in the question.
If the answer is NO, then Partners and employees of Partners would be prevented from posting answers in the forums too… is that also true?
Understandably, the spirit of the Partner program is to promote the Enterprise tiers and Partners are also offered insight that may not be shared with Free Tier users but then cutting those super experience people off from the community seems to be a move that is counter to the spirit of Open Source for Life too.
So, a Partner would be prevented from contributing community/free tier features then also?
I don’t think so. But, as a Liferay user or partner, you can only make changes to Liferay via permissible methods like Client Extensions and OSGi Modules only when you agree to the DXP EULA.
can a Partner organization (or an employee of a partner organization) provide help to (me) as a Community / Free Tier user
From what I understand is a lot of organizations used to charge customers for Liferay CE (maintenance and support by building custom modules, patches, making core changes etc) which is no more permitted under the Free Tier. But, as a partner or an employee of partner organization you should be able to come in as a consultant/developer just like for enterprise DXP tier and implement changes via permissible methods (just can’t charge for Liferay as they used to).
As a partner, you can’t get patches from DXP and help patch Free Tier customers.
@turnstok should be able to give more insights on this.
OK, much of this makes sense, but, I would like to make sure the following assumption is actually accurate…
I did not ever understand that by signing the DXP Free Tier license that a Liferay user would be blocked from building client extensions or OSGI Modules. That part might want to be confirmed/clarified.
In either case, my understanding is also that… as a Liferay user, who has built the portal from source, from this repo ( GitHub - liferay/liferay-portal · GitHub ) under the LGPL-2.1-or-later a Liferay user (not partner) can still build and extend freely, correct?
Sorry if this takes the thread into a seperate direction as it is off the topic of “Partner” positioning exactly, but they are very intertwined topics to understand.
I did not ever understand that by signing the DXP Free Tier license that a Liferay user would be blocked from building client extensions or OSGI Modules. That part might want to be confirmed/clarified.
As a DXP user you can only make changes via OSGI modules or client extension only(Search for “Permissible Extension Methods” in EULA https://www.liferay.com/documents/d/guest/Liferay-EULA-2102602_GL)
In either case, my understanding is also that… as a Liferay user, who has built the portal from source, from this repo ( GitHub - liferay/liferay-portal · GitHub ) under the LGPL-2.1-or-later a Liferay user (not partner) can still build and extend freely, correct?
Yes, you can directly build from source and extend freely, as its still under opensource license.
One main disadvantage with this is approach is, the community or Liferay team won’t be able to assist you with the issues related to any open source builds. You build the patches, upgrade paths etc (on other note, 7.4.13 update 152 7.4.13 Update 152 Release Apps: accessibility, account, adaptive-medi… · liferay/liferay-portal@81a4afb · GitHub was pushed last week 
).
So as far as I understand, my current ISV that offers support for my CE installation cannot help me to update to DXP free tier, because that violates the DXP EULA? (Which chapter in the license is that? I obviously missed that).
And I also cannot ask a Liferay Partner to help me evaluate DXP free tier, because thats not allowed too?
So I need to evaluate DXP free tier on my own and if I succeed I need to switch my former ISV to a Liferay Partner?
And if I fail, I cannot use Liferay anymore in the future, because there will be no new CE versions.
And that makes sense for Liferay from a sales perspective?
So as far as I understand, my current ISV that offers support for my CE installation cannot help me to update to DXP free tier, because that violates the DXP EULA? (Which chapter in the license is that? I obviously missed that).
There shouldn’t be an issue on that, but you need to generate the license key yourself from Liferay marketplace not by your ISV/Liferay partner (as long as they are not distributing it).
And I also cannot ask a Liferay Partner to help me evaluate DXP free tier, because thats not allowed too?
You can ask your partner/ISV to help you setup the instance, but you will require to generate the licene key yourself
So I need to evaluate DXP free tier on my own and if I succeed I need to switch my former ISV to a Liferay Partner?
I don’t think that is required unless you want to move to a partner, where they can get you an enterprise license and EULA doesn’t specify that ISV must be a Liferay Partner. Partner ecosystem has more access to Liferay’s resources than an non-partner. But, that doesn’t mean an experienced ISV can’t help you.
And if I fail, I cannot use Liferay anymore in the future, because there will be no new CE versions.
I don’t think that is a fully correct statement. Yes, CE releases doesn’t exist anymore, but the source code is still opensource which means you are free to build and use it without any EULA. If you get a free tier license, you are bound to EULA.
From what I understand, is that Liferay moved to this approach for few reasons
I’ve personally seen some instances, where an ISV (probably non-experienced) has modified the platform and left, which made the platform unstable and not usable, and difficult to upgrade. To be frank, a lot of customers thought its Liferay problem, which obviously wasn’t. Liferay’s new licensing approach prevent ISV’s/contractors from doing that.
