Parisian developers at French software house Modeliosoft are this week cracking open the cheese and wine to celebrate the news that Modelio, its core software offering, is being released under an open source license. The company has taken this move to logically increase and maximize community engagement and diversity. More specifically, its intention is to position Modelio as an attractive open source platform for developer modeling and innovation.

Licensed under the GPL v3, the core Modelio offering will deliver support for both the UML and BPMN standards under a modular architecture, with the key APIs licensed under the more permissive Apache 2.0 open source license. This move allows individual developers, communities, and partner companies to develop both open source and proprietary add-on modules, providing new specialist functionality to the core product.

"We wanted to optimize the attractiveness of the Modelio project for both individual developers and corporate partners by providing something more than another GPL licensed, single-vendor 'open core' product. Under this licensing model, typically only the original vendor has the ability to create a paid-for proprietary 'enterprise offering' based on the efforts of the whole community," comments Philippe Desfray, VP of R&D at Modeliosoft. "Our deliberate choice of licensing and our related business model ensures that all contributions to the core Modelio Project remain there for all, whilst allowing our community complete freedom on how they license and distribute add-on modules."

The new licensing model is of course intended to maximize the potential size and diversity of the community developing both open source and proprietary modules around Modelio. In turn, this should increase the overall level of contribution back into improving the core platform, as well as creating a greater choice of modules and additional functionality available for end-users.

The modelio.org community already provides a set of add-on modules, such as TOGAF Architect, which extends business process modeling into the broader enterprise architecture; SysML Architect for system (hardware, IT, etc.) architects; and Java Designer, which provides Java code generation from UML, including reverse and roundtrip engineering. Modeliosoft will be offering its own commercial support services around Modelio, as well as providing its own guaranteed Modelio distributions packaged with extensions, as solutions dedicated to specific enterprise needs.