Appistry Launching Free Download Program

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Appistry Vice President of Product Management & Marketing Sam Charington about their launch today of a new product, Appistry EAF Community Edition, a new licensing model (Open Distribution licensing model), and a new developer portal called Peer2Peer. Appistry had a soft launch in December 2007 prior to their public launch today.

As part of their Open Distribution Initiative, Charington feels that Appistry is taking the best of Open Source and commercial, giving companies the combination of the free software they like to see on their bottom line with the support and backing they like with commercial providers. The idea behind the EAF Community Edition is that Appistry can upsell to smaller companies as their applications and company grow.

The Appistry EAF Community Edition is not trialware; it's a fully functional product that can be used by established companies as well as start-ups, and includes up to five nodes and as many as 10 CPU cores in the fabric. The Peer2Peer Developer Portal allows developers to download EAF Community Edition, as well as provides access to documentation and a social networking platform to facilitate communication with other developers.

I can't help, however, comparing this new offering from Appistry with the model offered by GigaSpaces, which Charington feels is based on Appistry's prior model, called Right From the Start. From my perspective, Appistry is still geared toward their corporate customers like FedEx in their service offering, where GigaSpaces is willing to take a risk on start-ups, betting that as a company grows, there is far more money to be made in support packages than there is in software licensing, an approach that has historically worked well for such Open Source projects as JBoss and RedHat.

Full disclosure: my husband is one of the contest entrants in GigaSpaces' Open Spaces Developer Challenge.

Edited to correct date of soft launch.