Is it legal to develop an application using JIRA Rest APIs?

[Rana Asif Rubbani]

Hi, 

We are using JIRA Cloud for our in house development whereas some of our clients use JIRA Server. To get some quick insights/statistics, we have written a custom in-house application which consumes data from JIRA Rest APIs (Server/Cloud) and displays some charts/visualisations. 

I just wanted to confirm that using JIRA Rest APIs (from your licensed Jira instance) and creating your own custom applications outside Jira Marketplace is a legal thing and there are no licensing requirements or additional fees to do this.

Maybe I'm overthinking but just wanted to be sure that we are not doing anything wrong here.

Thanks

[Matthias Gaiser [K15t]]

Hi @Rana Asif Rubbani,

I'm happy to give you a reply. I'm working for K15t, an Atlassian marketplace partner, and we do lots of apps with their (REST) APIs on Server, Data Center and on Cloud.

It's totally fine to create your own custom applications which interact with Atlassian's APIs, there's no extra licensing agreement you have to sign or fees you have to pay.

If you're also talking about selling your custom application, you could also do so and don't need to follow some extra terms. However if you want to go this way, I'd recommend checking out to become a marketplace partner which gives you some benefits and you'd also some agreements then - more details on this page.

Have fun integrating with the APIs!

Cheers,
Matthias.

PS: If you have some API-level questions, you might also want to checkout the developer community: https://community.developer.atlassian.com/

[Warren]

Hi @Rana Asif Rubbani 

As far as I'm aware, if you're only using it internally (and hence not making money from it), there shouldn't be a problem.

The one area I'm a bit unsure of is you mention your clients have Jira Server and your application uses Server and Cloud APIs. Are you giving this application to your clients / letting them use it on their Jira instances? This may have a different answer to what I've just said above.

[Rana Asif Rubbani]

Thanks, Warren. Usage of it and making money from it are two different aspects. Any pointers from whom to ask these questions and get the clarity/know the boundaries?

[Warren]

Hi @Rana Asif Rubbani 

I've put a link to your question on a Slack board that Atlassian staff monitor, so hopefully one of them will respond here and you can ask your questions

[Rana Asif Rubbani]

Hi @Warren , found something here. Does it mean that if you have to develop an app/plugin for JIRA marketplace then license etc is needed. For anything external, license is not needed. Can we rely on this information?

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Commercial-Usage-of-JIRA-REST-API/qaq-p/741921