Licensing Flexibility for Personal Use?
Asked by Richard:

I was exposed to Confluence through my job. The company I work for has a license, and my co-workers and I use it everyday for document storage. I've used several wiki platforms including MediaWiki, and Confluence is by far superior.

I'm creating a genealogy wiki for my family, and after considering my options, I would definitely prefer to use Confluence as I'm already used to it, and I know my older family members will be able to use the editor with no problems, they'll never have to touch wiki markup. This makes Confluence ideal for my personal family project.

I would happily pay $10 for a license (or even more), but I expect more than ten of my family members to contribute to this wiki. Additionally, I expect it to be around for a long time with my children and children's children contributing to it. I can't drop $24,000 for unlimited users for a personal wiki project.

Is there anything in the middle or is Atlassian willing to work with me on a custom license? I really would prefer to use Confluence for this project as the alternatives are too hard for the older members of my family to figure out how to use.


Answers:
author: GabrielleJ
body: Not actually an answer, but you can create a "general ID" for some of your users and share it's credentials and has the least privilege to do what it needs to do.

For licensing, I always open up a support ticket against Atlassian to get an official answer (<https://support.atlassian.com>).

comments: author: TomC
body: Good suggestions, Gabrielle. If Richard goes directly to Atlassian for an answer I hope he posts an update here as I'm curious about the answer too.


author: Richard
body: I have a ticket open with them, no reply yet though.


author: Richard
body: In so many words they told me to f' off "they don't want poor folks" using their products.


author: Davin Studer
body: "In so many words they told me to f' off"Seriously? I find it hard to believe that they actually told you to "f" off. I've never had their customer support be rude like that. If the support rep indeed told you to "f" off I would report that to someone. I am sure the official company stance would not be to insult customers.


author: GabrielleJ
body: The genericID option maybe the best option you can do.


author: Richard
body: "In so many words" means they didn't outright say that but implied it.

I don't expect having a ton of users, but I do expect more than ten. After ten users a license jumps from $10 to $1,200 for 25 users. That I cannot afford.

This is for a family genealogy project so it doesn't fall under an official non-profit or open source project which are the two areas they offer flexible licensing for.

comments: author: Davin Studer
body: Ok. But really I think you meant "In not so many word." There is a world of difference between those two statements. As for licensing like someone else mentioned you could create a generic user that you family could use and then keep it under 10. That would probably be the best way.


author: Davin Studer
body: For the licensing it is based on who can currently use the product. Do you really anticipate hundreds/thousands of family members having access to the site at any given moment?