Jade waives developer's fee for version 6 launch

By RICHARD WOOD

Jade is giving away its development software free in an attempt to encourage its adoption and hopes to win fans among the open-source community with Linux versions.

The Christchurch company has waived its $6400 developer's licence fee for the launch of Jade 6. Developers will be able to use it free to create their own applications, but they still have to buy a "runtime" licence to run those applications commercially.

As well as running on Windows, the Jade 6 runs on the Red Hat 9.0 and SuSE Enterprise 8 versions of the Linux operating system.

Making the development environment free is a significant shift for Jade. It considered charging $100,000 for the environment when it was first launched. A big gain for Jade users is that Jade-written applications will be transferable between Linux and Microsoft servers, needing only to translate data.

Jade chief executive Sir Gil Simpson said the Linux strategy took the company into the commodity arena.

Jade had provided a restricted free version for students and educational institutes. Runtime licences started at $1200 for an eight-processor licence suitable for five to six users.

Simpson said open source was good for generic applications such as Linux and Open Office, but "we need to see if that model will lead to innovation and creativity".

Jade 6