How mature does an open source project have to be to get a free license?

Question

I'm starting a small pseudo-company, mostly consisting of an extended group of a friends, to work on a few open source (all either GPLv3 or Apache) projects. I was wondering how far along the project(s) need to be in order to qualify for the free open source license?

I want to use Jira (at least) from the get go, as a way to organize everything and give people time to get used to the system before it's really needed. I am already paying for the 10 user on-demand instance, but from the way this is looking, I may need more than that MUCH sooner than I expected.

I am also fully able and willing to host my own instance. The on-demand instance was chosen as it, by itself, is cheaper than spinning up the Amazon EC2 instance to house it.

I looked through all the material I could find, but was not able to find anything stating a minimum maturity. Only license restrictions.

Edit:

I'm also looking to use Confluence, BitBucket, and Bamboo.

Timothy Millican · Answer

Yes, I did look at that page. I did not, however, fill out the form, as they require a link to the source code. We are still in an early design phase, so we don't have any actual code yet.

This is somewhat of a planning question, so I can figure out when to actually submit the request, with the best chance of it being approved.

Timothy · Answer

Some info here but I guess you already looked into this (http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request) and filled up the form.