Opensource Legal Cloud License Agreements for Marketplace Partners - Our Journey with Bonterms
The Problem
Ok, lets be real for a second.
Most marketplace vendors start out small, very small. Most of us are bootstrapping our first app off the ground and then on the basis of MVP feedback, we're investing more of our cash or actively fundraising.
One of the places that we often don't like to invest, as software developers, is in legal stuff so we can get caught in the copy/paste world of DIY and then hoping for the best.
In the world of growing compliance regulations, the risk of getting this stuff wrong can be the end of our business.
As you sign up more and more customers, you also start learning that they sometimes have legal and procurement teams who just love to pick to pieces your legal agreement. This can lead to lost opportunities, expensive legal re-writes and always results in a slowing sales cycle.
Their Solution
Bonterms formed out of the tech and software world to solve this precise problem. We (Revyz) were introduced to them by Atlassian and when they explained their open source 'off the shelf' agreement, we pretty much instantly saw the value.
Rather than be created by a single law firm, their standardized agreement has been vetted and contributed to by over 100 lawyers, a large panel of vendors (that includes Atlassian) and a growing collection of end user companies.
"What Bonterms is about is removing that animosity and frustration from the conversation, enabling a different kind of contracting where you start with your core needs already met and then customize as needed."
Todd Smithline, Bonterms CEO
You can learn more about their model by watching our quick interview video.
Our Experience
The Bonterms agreement model is open source, thus you can get going without paying a fee for it, but it is strongly recommended that you seek legal advice. Our CEO drove the process himself and it took around a day to complete.
The Benefits for a Marketplace Partner Like Revyz
For us, we feel that this type of agreement will become similar to the Cloud Fortified badge or the SOC2 badge, it will help prospective customers (especially those big ones) see us as both a reputable business to deal with (and to entrust all of their data and configuration to!) and also as a business who they can focus less of the procurement process on reviewing our legal terms.
That leads to one of the most important parts. The more marketplace partners who adopt this model, the more positive impact this will have for all of us.
Watch the Interview
Conclusion
We are one of the earliest adopters in the Atlassian Marketplace of the Bonterms model and we are extremely happy with the outcome. We'd strongly encourage other partners to look into this and get your own legal advisors to consider it.
For more, visit: https://bonterms.com
About Revyz: Revyz is an award winning leader in managing, optimizing and backups for Jira and Confluence
Stu's Fineprint: Although it may sound like it, we are in no way partnered with Bonterms and receive no benefits for sharing this article - we simply see it as a very positive thing for marketplace partners to get involved in.
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