Community Edition

The OpenWGA Community Edition is a fully-featured CMS web platform for the needs of small and medium businesses, available under fair open source terms and without any fee.

Receive your copy of the OpenWGA CMS Community Edition on our downloads page.

Support for the OpenWGA CMS Community Edition is available via typical community resources for open source projects like the Issue Tracker found on this website.

Requirements

Being 100% pure Java Software the OpenWGA CMS Server is able to run on all platforms where Java (Version 6 or higher) and an Application Server of the Jave EE Platform (Version 5 or higher) is available. You actually don't need a complete J2EE stack as a Servlet/JSP runtime including some additional J2EE APIs is already suitable.

Innovation Gate recommends running the OpenWGA CMS Server on the reliable Open Source Servlet/JSP runtime server Apache Tomcat. We provide some distribution forms for Linux systems in our downloads which already include this server platform and can be installed like a standalone program, so you do not necessarily need to setup this part yourself.

We recommend running OpenWGA on debian-based Linux systems (Debian itself, Ubuntu) and using our debian package repository for installation and upgrades.

A separate requirement is the database server to host the content repository on. The OpenWGA CMS Community Edition supports content repositories based on the popular platforms MySQL and PostgreSQL which are also available as Open Source Software. A third option is the commercial platform Microsoft SQLServer.

Alternatively the integrated HSQLDB database engine can be used to host smaller content repositories for evaluation, testing and development purposes.

The OpenWGA Enterprise Edition supports additional database servers, mostly used on large enterprises, like IBM DB2, Oracle and IBM Domino.

License

The OpenWGA Community Edition is distributed under the license terms of the GNU GPL Version 3 or higher. In addition a special exception is granted by the copyright holders of OpenWGA called OpenWGA plugin exception allowing it to be distributed alongside with OpenWGA plugins of arbitrary licenses.

The official license text of the OpenWGA plugin exception:

OpenWGA is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

In addition, as a special exception, the copyright holders of OpenWGA give you permission to combine the program with independent modules that extend OpenWGA in the form of an OpenWGA Plugin that is installed and invoked via the well defined OpenWGA Plugin Architecture.

You may copy and distribute such a system following the terms of the GNU GPL for OpenWGA and the licenses of the OpenWGA Plugins concerned.

License Questions and Answers

In non-lawyer terms: What does does the "plugin exception" really mean?

The OpenWGA core server product is fully licensed under the GPL terms, which means it can be freely redistributed given that the requirements of the GPL are met.

These requirements include that the source code must be freely available, that all modifications of this source code must again be licensed under the GPL and that all other modules that are distributed with the OpenWGA Server are themselves licensed under GPL-compatible free software licenses.

A special module type for the OpenWGA Server that we call "OpenWGA Plugin" is excluded from this requirements. OpenWGA Plugins that are distributed along with the OpenWGA Server (or derived projects) may be licensed independently, which includes arbitrary commercial licenses but also various free software licenses.

Does this exception mean anything for the mere usage of the software?

No. As a pure user of this software you just may consider it as available under the GPL Version 3 License.

What may these OpenWGA Plugins add to the OpenWGA Server Platform?

There is a wide range of functionalities that may come with OpenWGA Plugins and enhance the OpenWGA Server in various ways, like new backends for content repositories, additional authentication options, workflow engines, website or application designs and much more.

If you need to extend the functionalities of the OpenWGA Server in some custom way you most likely can do so by creating an OpenWGA Plugin.

Can the OpenWGA Server be used in commercial environments and/or together with other commercial software that is not licensed under a free software license?

Yes. The GPL does not restrict the usage of the software, only its distribution. Therefor you may use the OpenWGA Server for any purpose, including commercial enterprise usage, without any fee.
For your own usage you also may combine the OpenWGA Server with any other application, regardless of its license. This includes commercial J2EE application servers or database servers for instance.

My company's software usage policy prohibits GPL software. Is there still a way for us to use the OpenWGA Server?

For these cases we also offer the OpenWGA Server under a commercial license. Please contact us for details.

While were at it, the acronym WGA confuses me a bit. Does your software have anything to do with...

Nope, and in fact the name of our software - originally standing for "WebGate Anywhere" - is older than the Microsoft pendant. WGA has been around on the german CMS market since 2002 and has no relations whatsoever to any later appearing anti piracy systems :-)