Making sense of Dangermond’s #ESRIUC “API free for non-commercial use” Comment

In his discussion on Monday at the plenary Jack Dangermond made a comment during the discussion of ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Server that the APIs (JavaScript, Silverlight and Flex APIs) were now “free for non-commercial use.” That confused me and many others based on the tweets. So, I went to check out what that comment meant.

The “news” really relates to a few different things. One is the closing of ArcWeb Services. Some of the people using it had “no where” to go after it shut down. Why? The APIs for ArcGIS Server were only licensed to be used if you owned a copy of ArcGIS Server. Many users of ArcWeb Services don’t have a copy. Thus, they couldn’t take advantage of the free and premium services from ArcGIS Online.

This change means that now non-commercial use of the APIs is ok if you don’t own ArcGIS Server (whether you are a non-profit or commercial entity). You can use the APIs to hit the free ArcGIS Online data, per its licensing (most is free for non-commercial use, but there’s a fee for commercial use) but all users must pay for premium data. You can also use the APIs to hit any ArcGIS published data to which you have access. (Fees/options are discussed in this FAQ and chart.)