Hi everyone, Luca and Steve here.

We have a big announcement to make today. A few months back, we decided
to join forces and start a new company:

ScientiaMobile ( http://www.scientiamobile.com ).

The point of the new company is easily explained: as WURFL gains
popularity and more and more companies are requesting professional support,
there was no way this could be achieved while we were developing and
supporting WURFL as a side activity to our regular jobs. ScientiaMobile
is the roof under which Luca and Steve are bringing 100% of the
WURFL intellectual property and fire power. The days of juggling WURFL
with a ton of other tasks are gone. Now we are totally committed to making
WURFL an even greater resource for mobile developers than it has ever been.
As we say in our tagline:

              WURFL has graduated

The core offering will evolve around the following:

-    Dual Licensing of the WURFL APIs: Java, PHP, .Net and
Database API (the artist previously known as Tera-WURFL)

-    WURFL Cloud Services. I know the name "buzzes", yet it accurately
describes what many have been requesting repeatedly: a highly-available
central repository serving updated WURFL information at all times.
 At this point, the service is still in alpha, but we gladly accept early birds,
ready to bargain a substantial discount for the service with the fine-tuning of
the WURFL Cloud client component.

-    Some other tools that are too early to announce.



We know you have some questions at this point. Let's see if we can
address some before you ask:

Will WURFL remain an Open Source project?

The answer is: Yes. It will.

We are totally aware that much of WURFL's success is based on adoption by you,
the great WURFL community, and we want things to stay that way. Having said this,
now that previous jobs are quit, and houses are mortgaged, we also need to make
ScientiaMobile a profitable enterprise, which means that some of the previous
completely free, no-strings attached "offerings" may now be limited for
certain organizations, unless they cover for part of the value they are getting.
One way to put it is that the model where WURFL would rely on people's gratitude
was not very sustainable economically. If you work for a commercial company or
any other organization with a budget, you will have a good reason to walk
into your manager's office and say: "Boss, I got good news and bad news.
The good news is that WURFL has a company behind it, offering support and
better tools. The bad news is that we will need to make some space for
it in our budget"

There is an elephant in the room. But we won't make-believe that it is
not there. The elephant is the new FOSS license we are placing on the APIs.
We are switching from GPL to Affero GPL (AGPL)  Version 3 from
the Free Software Foundation:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

In a nutshell, AGPL is a strong copyleft, just like GPL, but with
one big difference: using your WURFL application on a web server constitutes
distributions and triggers the GPL copyleft provisions. Many organizations
will perceive AGPL compliance as a restriction. Such restrictions can be lifted
by purchasing a commercial license from ScientiaMobile.

Of course, the data will still be distributed freely, which means that,
while companies pay for the API license once, they'll benefit from our
continued effort to enrich and organize device data for the years to come.

That's pretty much it for the first announcement.

Looking forward to your continued encouragement and support.

Steve and Luca