Liferay Portal is an open source portal that helps organizations collaborate more efficiently by providing a consolidated view of disparate applications. It is used by large and small organizations all over the world. Liferay has an extensive list of features that compares with most commercial portals but without the high license fees.

Business Friendly Open Source License

Liferay is made available under the MIT license, which is essentially the same as the Apache and BSD licenses. Unlike the GPL or LGPL licenses, the MIT/Apache/BSD licenses are business friendly and contain no license fees or reciprocity clauses. This means you can bundle Liferay or your branch of Liferay and even resell it if you want. There are no strings attached.

Companies benefit when they choose to contribute their bug fixes and modifications back to Liferay because they can more easily upgrade to the latest version of Liferay without paying the penalty of spending time and energy reintegrating their own custom changes. Our large community of contributors can even improve on another company's contributions - creating a steam roll effect of quality open source software.

Companies also benefit when they can build value on top of Liferay and choose not to contribute it so they can resell their modifications. We don't believe that just because we give our product you have to also. We believe a business friendly open source license gives companies greater protection in their investment by providing more options.

Liferay vs. Closed Source Portals

Liferay provides the lowest total cost of ownership. There are ZERO license fees. Don't pay more because you add more users or need to scale with more CPUs and servers.

Liferay has no application server agenda. Don't be forced into buying more licenses because your portal was made by the same vendor that made your application server. Mix and match so you get the best of breed.

You can develop portlets with a full featured IDE like Eclipse, Netbeans, and JBuilder or with lightweight editor like EditPlus, VI, and Emacs. Commercial portals love to sell tools that promise to save you time and money but almost always end up wasting you time and money. This isn't 1999. Save money.

Open source means the code is in your hands. If you want to customize it, you can. If there are security flaws, everyone is made aware and the community can participate in fixing it quickly. There is actually less risk in going with a sustained open source product than in going with a commercial vendor. Vendors can go out of business. Vendors can merge and render your product dead in the water. Sustained open source products have an active community around it that works together.

Liferay vs. Open Source Portals

Not all open source licenses are created equal. Some licenses require that your modifications be contributed if you choose to sell or distribute your product. Some open source vendors still charge a license fee for commercial use. Others are confused and flip flop from being closed source one minute and open source the next minute. Liferay is open source because we believe it is the next step in the evolution of software development.

Liferay has a very active community as evidenced by our active forums. If you're a small organization that doesn't require mission critical response times, you'll get the help you need. If your organization requires mission critical support so that your project deadlines are not compromised, you can get direct access to the developers of Liferay through professional support and consulting.

Contact us at sales@liferay.com for more information about our services.