I've been thinking for a while about some repackaging for Saxon, and I've now got to the point where I'm working out the fine detail and creating appropriate build files.

The main idea is that instead of two products, Saxon-B and Saxon-SA, there will in future be three: Home Edition (HE), Professional Edition (PE), and Enterprise Edition (EE).

At the top end, EE is just a rebranding of SA, to reflect the fact that the commercial Saxon product is now differentiated by a lot more than schema awareness. For example, many people are using it for the streaming capabilities. The -SA suffix causes confusion because people imagine that you have to use a schema to use Saxon-SA.

The introduction of the Professional Edition (PE) is an attempt to tackle the problem that an awful lot of people are currently getting a free ride, using Saxon for mission-critical production work and contributing nothing in return. There's a lot to be said for open source and free software, but unless there is some way of getting revenue to fund investment from the people who get value from it, investment in the technology starts to suffer, as does support. The revenue from Saxon-SA users has cross-subsidised the whole operation quite successfully until now, but the product is getting ever bigger and more complex and it's not clear that the current business model scales to meet the growing requirements of the user community. So the aim is to produce a very low-cost (but not zero-cost) version of the product that will be attractive to the bulk of commercial users.

Of course the main reason people are reluctant to spend money is that the free version is good enough to meet their needs, and this means we need to make HE a bit less attractive to this community than Saxon-B is currently (but without alienating the open source community who provide so much value, collectively, by creating public awareness). This is a delicate tightrope to walk. For some time now I've been making new features available only in Saxon-SA; increasingly "minor" features will show up first in PE. The main carrot that I'm hoping will tempt people to take PE, however, will be convenience. For example, some of the optional features of the product will be available to HE users only in the form of source code, whereas they will be fully packaged in Saxon-PE. I'm also thinking that bug fixes might be available to HE users only in source form, while PE and EE users will get them packaged as a maintenance release.

Another benefit of the repackaging is that it "cleans up" the open source product. Because of the long history, there are components such as the SQL module where it is not always possible to trace all the contributors (and certainly, where there are no formal signed handovers from those contributors clearing the code for use). This has caused problems for some integrators wanting to integrate the source into their own offerings. Many of these contributions are in non-core modules which can be isolated so that those who care about these things get a "cleaner" source distribution, in terms of having known and traceable provenance. (Using this kind of code in a commercial product is far less of a problem, because Saxonica in effect indemnifies the end user.)

There are lots of risks associated with this strategy - one of them being that users will simply stick with Saxon 9.1. Well, actually, that's not really a risk - it's not a problem to Saxonica if they do, and the fact that they can do so will deflect some of the inevitable grumbling. Over time, I think we should be able to get to the position where those who have a good reason for not spending any money can get most of what they need without doing so, but those who are deriving real commercial benefits from the software contribute something to its ongoing development, and if we can get to that position then I think everyone will be better off.