Dear Non-Profit License (NPL) Users:

In recent months we have seen a substantial increase in complaints about our new NPL policy. We therefore felt compelled to make a public statement to address the most common concerns which have been brought to our attention.

IN THE PAST…
TeamSpeak was founded by individuals with a passion to build a powerful, quality, scalable voice chat solution for gamers. Initially there was no licensing system at all. Just like today our software was available for free download to the masses, and by the masses it was indeed obtained. TeamSpeak’s popularity grew, and some people with the technical savvy, know-how, or an existing hosting business began to take it upon themselves to offer TeamSpeak server hosting…some for free, and some for commercial gain. It was soon realized that we could no longer ignore commercializing a component of our software for the purpose of facilitating for-profit hosting entities. Thus, the NPL was born to address the needs of most common guilds, clans, and non-profit communities while a commercial licensing and billing system was also created for entities which are now known as Authorized TeamSpeak Host Providers (ATHPs). However, without an integrated license mechanism for TeamSpeak software itself, piracy primarily consisting of unlicensed users hosting servers for commercial gain continued to grow as quickly as TeamSpeak’s popularity…that is, until TeamSpeak 3 was introduced.

IN THE PRESENT…
As most people are aware, TeamSpeak 3 contains a powerful licensing system…a system which includes built in anti-piracy measures, license data which can be monitored, and a system whereby licensing can be enforced in more ways than ever before. In addition, our default TeamSpeak 3 server download includes a native 32-slot, single virtual server license which does not require registration of any kind, and is currently utilized by thousands of small gaming guilds and clans which do not necessarily NEED an NPL. However, some of our older policies surrounding the NPL have carried from TeamSpeak 2 to TeamSpeak 3…one such policy is the fact that we continue to allow 10 virtual servers per NPL. This “benefit” alone has been among the biggest source of abuse, piracy, and general issues we have encountered since the existence of the NPL. Many of you may not be aware that our dedicated customer support staff spends more time dealing with NPL issues which bring us $0 in revenue than all other customer queries combined — both of which we must continue to support if we are to stay afloat as a company. Bottom line? NPLs actually cost us money to manage, maintain, and support…yet as a company we INSIST on their existence. We hope this brings additional perspective with regard to the magnitude of the problems we are facing with the NPL, and the amount of time and resources these issues consume from our team.

IN THE FUTURE…
Our goal is NOT to eliminate the NPL for at its core, the NPL drives the very spirit and REASON for which TeamSpeak was invented in the first place. Instead, it is our desire to legitimize NPL operations in such a manner that they should be utilized by non-profit, non-commercial entities seeking quality voice chat for the sole purpose of facilitating communication within their own communities…and not necessarily someone else’s. We want NPL licensees to be indicative of the very guilds, clans, and communities which have thrived over the years, rely heavily on TeamSpeak for their communication needs, and have helped us grow. It is for these reasons that our latest NPL policy changes have one primary goal in mind — to minimize the abuse and piracy which unfortunately tends to fuel some NPL users. At this point, we can only promise two things: 1) there will probably be additional changes coming soon to further fine-tune our NPL policies and 2) regardless of such changes, the NPL is NOT going away.

IN CLOSING…
We want to extend our deepest gratitude to the many users which have legitimately acquired NPLs for non-commercial purposes, and have spent countless hours contributing and being a part of TeamSpeak’s growth and success. For this we honor you, and we hope you will continue your efforts. We recognize those of you in this category and we fully expect you to observe that the changes we are implementing will for the most part not affect you.

Our sincere regards,

– TeamSpeak Team