June 16, 2104: Readium Foundation today announced major modifications to its membership terms and open source software licensing programs. Effective immediately, full membership in the Readium Foundation will be available to any organization or individual based on a sliding scale of dues starting at just $500 per year (for non-profits, individuals, and startups). The Foundation also announced that the permissive BSD license will be preferred for Readium.org projects, and that major components of the Readium SDK project, including all of its portable JavaScript code and platform-specific code (Objective C for iOS & OS/X, Java for Android, C# for Windows, etc.) will now be licensed under BSD. The dual-licensing of Readium SDK will be continued for its C++ core library, with the commercial-friendly (non-copyleft) license now available for a significantly reduced commitment. The commitment required to obtain the Readium SDK license has been reduced by almost 50% - from USD $60,000 or 6 months of contributions to USD $30,000 or 3 months of contributions.

"Readium.org has made rapid progress in its first year" said Bill McCoy, President, Readium Foundation. "Several Readium SDK based solutions with comprehensive EPUB 3 support are now shipping, including apps from ACCESS, Kobo, and TXTR, with many more adoptions under development. The Readium.org community is steadily growing, with over 40 organization members and many more contributors. The lifeblood of any open source project is participation, and the decision by the Readium Foundation Board to  liberalize membership and licensing terms should lead to even more adoption and contributions in the future."

For more information on Readium SDK licensing, see: http://readium.org/license-readium-sdk . For more information on membership in Readium Foundation, see: http://readium.org/membership/join-readium-foundation .