We want to share one of the biggest news in Weblate history with you. We started a company called Weblate s.r.o., registered in Czechia, keeping Weblate’s residence unchanged.
In the previous post, we already announced the reasons. This article goes deeper into that topic, and provides practical information about the improvements and changes.
Weblate started in 2012, originally as a part-time project to solve Michal’s need for well-integrated localization tools. A lot has changed since the SUSE Hackweek times; Weblate has grown into a libre localization standard and a responsible, sustainable, and well-respected business at the same time.
Until now, it lacked a company representing the team, that shares the same values, backs the development, and is ready to care about community and commercial customers’ needs sustainably and responsively. Michal Čihař – the founder, as a registered business person, has been the legal entity providing Weblate services to companies all around the world and leading the development of the platform as well. His role in leading Weblate forward does not change.
Michal becomes the new company’s sole owner and the leader, supervising the development and making the architecture decisions. Our growing team of full-time Weblate developers is improving the platform under his leadership.
Benjamin remains responsible for relations with the community, customer success and perfect care of them, and furthering the good name of Weblate. He now receives significant help as well, from the new teammate Alice, freeing him more to work with the community and focus on Weblate presentation, publicity, and growth.
Víťa stays in charge of Weblate design and user experience, and we have big plans for this for 2025. You can keep your fingers crossed, and we promise to inform you as soon as we are able to. Unfortunately, we cannot tell you more yet.
The important basis unchanged is the license, GNU GPLv3.
What is changing, and how does it affect whom?
All Weblate services and contracts, fulfilled by Michal Čihař – the registered business person, will continue in the care of the company from November 1st. This includes support packages, hosted services, custom development, and donations that will keep being used to fund the development of Weblate and the open-source projects we rely on.
Subscriptions
Subscribers with recurring payments set will need to re-enter their cards; there is no transfer of card details between business entities. The purchase process and billing management on Hosted Weblate stay the same for now, so the New payment button next to the billing cycle of your choice is the way to re-insert a card. Owners of dedicated instances and support packages can make the change in their familiar portal. The paid period extends the existing one; nothing is lost. We didn’t want to make too many changes at once.
New legal documents
Community on Hosted Weblate will see the new Terms of Service for agreement when logging in, together with the new Privacy Policy. The same will gradually happen for users of the dedicated instances we provide to communities and commercial customers.
We worked hard with experts on these documents to ensure that everyone’s rights and privacy are valued and honored, and every user or company is well-informed about their options and rights. It also grants us the powers needed to keep running Weblate instances as a secure and safe space for all users. For these reasons, the documents are lengthy.
Requirements for commercial companies and community users differ at some points, so this is specified to prevent any confusion. We always store the least-needed amount of personal data. For example, we are required by law to store data about the purchasing side, but we won’t collect similar data from community users. As we prefer not to send Weblate users from all around the world to look for specific paragraphs of Czech law, these are cited in the texts.
Better partner
As you survived that lengthy paragraph about lengthy documents, let’s mention some good, short things. It will now be an easier and more sensible process to achieve certifications like ISO and SoC2 as a company. Certified company is a more comfortable-to-work-with partner for large non-profits, government offices, and commercial companies. All these diverse user bases share their feedback and opinions, like the libre community does. But as there is and always will be the single libre code base, some are also able to fund significant improvements in Weblate development, from which every single Weblate user benefit — the localized projects’ users together with them.
To sum this up, this is an exciting evolution on Weblate’s way! If you have any questions or ideas about it, you can contact us at Weblate care, mail us at care at weblate.org, toot on Mastodon, or join our discussions. Nothing has changed in our likeness of discussion, except we will have more time for it.
