On behalf of Transparent Technologies, Inc., I would like to announce the immediate release and availability of Open-Realty® v3.0.

With this release we have added many new and exciting features and optimizations, and re-written a considerable amount of the core, making this our finest and most powerful version of Open-Realty® to date. We have greatly improved our blogging system, added the ability to automatically post listings and blog posts to Twitter, enhanced our listing editor, rewritten our listing field editor to be much easier to use adding drag and drop support, and we squashed a big pile of bugs that were reported by the community. More than 100 user requested items/improvements were addressed alone. Of no small consequence, we have also changed the Open-Realty® license. Open-Realty® from this point forward will be licensed as a commercial product, backed with available commercial support. I will address our new license changes first, then I will discuss a few of the new features we have added.

 Why did we change the license and what does this mean? The reason for the licensing change is not really a simple explanation and there is more to this decision than would fit here, but there are two primary reasons.

First, for those of you who do not know me, I am a big advocate of open source software and I have loved developing Open-Realty® (OR) and moreover, being able to keep it open source and free since 2002. I have been working within the open source community since long before it was a "trendy" or a marketable thing to do. Having said that,  be assured I did not come to the decision to change OR's licensing easily, but the sheer costs of developing, maintaining, and supporting OR for free as we have for the last 8 years is just not sustainable. Transparent Technonogies can no longer subsidize the very large number of individuals who benefit from OR every day and even earn their living from it, who also expect support, but do not contribute to OR's development.

Second, certain individuals have taken OR's open source program code and some of our copyrighted commercial program code and they have re-distributed both (for profit) in ways that violate our licensing while at the same time they publicly and privately associate themselves with our well established brand. Other actions by these same individuals indicate they intend to cause financial harm to myself and Transparent Technologies and they intend to continue creating confusion within the marketplace. This situation even further exacerbates the problem with OR's sustainability that I already mentioned above.

What does this licensing change mean for you the Open-Realty® user? 

• We will still offer a FREE version of Open-Realty® , but our program code will no longer be fully open-source, and you will have to register to download it. The free version requires that you display a "Powered By Open-Realty®" logo visibly on your web site.
• For users who require commercial support including the ability to remove the "powered by" logo, we have a Site License available for $149. This license includes one year of professional support & upgrades for a single site, after which you can opt to to renew at any time for $60/year.
• Ongoing development of Open-Realty®  will now be commercially funded, ideally this means more new features, much more often.

That covers our licensing changes, but let's move on to why you are reading this at all, I want to highlight just a few of the new features in Open-Realty® v3.0.