TRB PRO is a subscription-based service that offers you a commercial license, additional gems, and access to our visual editor and to our private PRO Slack workspace for casual support.

It will be launched in February 2020.

• Paid gems: trailblazer-workflow and trailblazer-activity-implementation that both help implementing long-running processes using the editor.
• The commercial license can be found here.

License

All Trailblazer core gems are licensed under the LGPLv3. Additional gems are MIT.

FAQ

There is a lot of confusion around the LGPLv3 license. It is actually not as restrictive as you might’ve thought! Here are the most commonly asked questions that we answered with the help of a lawyer specialized in licensing.

• FAQ
• Why is TRB licensed under LGPL, not MIT?

Trailblazer (TRB) is an Open-Source project. Since we want to keep it that way, we decided to raise awareness for the “cost” of our work - providing new versions and features is incredibly time-consuming for us, but we love what we do. The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) has no implications for 75% of our users. Nevertheless, the license change has lead to an increasing number of inquiries for a commercial license. This creates a win-win situation, you as the user have your peace of mind, and we can continue working with your funds.

• FAQ
• What are the implications of LGPL and how can I avoid those?

The LGPL allows users to use and integrate LGPL software components into their own software without being required to release the source code of their own software components. However, if users modify LGPL software components (“derivative work”), they are required to make the modified software component available under the same LGPL license.

To avoid the latter with TRB, users have to comply with para. 5 LGPLv2.1:

A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a “work that uses the Library”. Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.

In other words: if you use the TRB libraries in your commercial applications or Open-Source projects, you’re not creating a derivative work of Trailblazer. Your software can be distributed under any terms.

• FAQ
• I use TRB in my MIT-OSS project. Does that mean I have to relicense mine to LPGL?

No, just make sure you that you don’t use a derivative of any portion of the Library (see above). Again, using Trailblazer in your projects, overriding its methods, “monkey-patching”, etc is not considered a derivate. You’re free to pick your own license.

• FAQ
• We use TRB in a commercial, closed-source application. Do we have to publish our source code now?

No, you don’t have to license your project under LGPL and you don’t have to provide your source code publicly.

However, if you use TRB modules licensed under LGPLv3 please

• provide a relinking mechanism for TRB libraries
• provide a license copy & explicitly acknowledge TRB usage
• make a TRB source code copy available for customers or link to our repositories
• note that TRB source code modifications are not proprietary

Editor

Whether you want to visualize a complex operation or model a long-running business process with dozens of steps, resume/suspend points and different branches, the editor will be your best friend.

You can import diagrams from the command line into your project using the trailblazer-developer gem, transform them into Ruby and implement the steps with your own business logic.

We use a subset of BPMN for the visual language in the editor, but added our own set of restrictions and semantics to it. It is possible to organize huge applications and their workflows in our editor backend, model and debug visually, and import them into your real Ruby applications.

Known Bugs

The current editor is first-generation and was about 2 years of work. It is sufficient to work with and allows creating complex workflows and collaborations. We use it in several commercial projects.

There are a bunch of known issues with the first-generation editor. Always save your diagram after you added or rearranged a new element. You can then reload should you encounter a bug.

• Arrows or connections are a PITA in more complex diagrams. When dragging arrows, they might suddenly snap to some random point or even add another joint. It is very hard to rearrange arrows laying behind other objects. This is one main reason we’re working hard on gen2.
• You can’t label arrows. This is annoying when a task or event has several outgoing arrows - you’re not able to assign a semantic via the editor. In the meantime, you can do this by #TODO