privacyIDEA is enterprise software. Managing lots of authentication devices for lots of users is a task that occurs in a company network.
privacyIDEA is licensed under an Open Source license. This guarantees, that a company using the Open Source software privacyIDEA can use this software for life. In contrast prorpietary software or software-as-a-service (SaaS) can be changed, billed differently or even completely deleted. You could not do anything about it. The Open Source privacyIDEA is under your control – forever.
The Open Source license dos not mean that a company has no costs in regards to two factor authentication. At least they need to pay the administrator.
In any case the Open Source license states that this software comes without any warranty. A company using privacyIDEA needs to be aware of this.
Due to this we decided to add a welcome dialog in version 2.20. This welcome dialog points out the fact, that it is important to get a Service Level Agreement (privacyIDEA Enterprise Edition) when running this software in an enterprise environment.
The administrator can define a policy (scope=webui, action=hide_welcome) which deactivates this welcome dialog. Anyway, if you run privacyIDEA with more than 50 assigned tokens and without subscription/SLA, we think it is a good idea, to warn the administrator again about the intrinsic risk running a software without warranty. The welcome dialog will be displayed again.
Using this approach we hope to help companies understand the legal situation when running privacyIDEA.
You are welcome to contact us with any questions.