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• Provide affordable commercial support to all users of our Open Source software
• Recognize and honor those individuals and institutions in our user community that have made major contributions to the development and enhancement of our Open Source applications
• Raise awareness of the many ways that members of our user community can benefit from the use and support of our Open Source software distributions

Many users of Index Data's Open Source software already contribute to its ongoing support and development by discovering bugs and weaknesses in the code and taking the initiative to develop fixes for them, as well as to extend functionality. It is this active participation, in conjunction with sponsored development, that has enabled Index Data to continue to improve our existing Open Source software and develop new applications that keep up with your rising needs and expectations.

To show our appreciation for your commitment to our Open Source distributions, we are creating three "honor rolls:" one to recognize developers around the world who have added to our code base, another to recognize those institutions that have sponsored development of, or functional improvement to, our Open Source distributions; and a third to recognize all the users of our Open Source software that have purchased a commercial support agreement with us. These three honor rolls are under construction.

In addition to our standard service agreement, we are now also offering a ticket-based service agreement for those of you who feel comfortable relying primarily on your own staff for support, but who nevertheless want the insurance of timely assistance with problems and small coding changes at a very modest cost. Because of its limitations, ticket-based support is not a substitute for our standard support, but it will provide you with the same fast access to the services of our developers. And best of all, you can choose to use your tickets for minor development and software changes as well as for troubleshooting and problem resolution.

As we all know, freely available Open Source software is not really free. Money and programming resources are needed to develop the software and keep it up-to-date. In the past, most of those resources have been contributed by a few of you who have sponsored major development, and by Index Data staff who have taken time from their paid work to keep on improving the software without compensation. The expanded set of options we are offering in our Partnership for Support and Sustainability is designed to enable all of you who use our Open Source software to contribute to its ongoing development in ways that will also benefit your organization.