Licensing issues


Just like there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to licensing issues when it comes to deployment. The first side is deciding how you are going to license the application you are developing. The second side is dealing with the licensing of the third-party products you have used in developing the system.

Licensing your product

We touched on this in the section, ‚“What Are My Licensing Options ‚½. But that was licensing as it applies to custom software development. What if you are creating a vertical market application ( Figure 6 )? Well, the world is your oyster and you can create the value of your pearl.


Figure 6. Sample of an End User License Agreement (EULA) for a vertical market product

This is one area you have total control over and can basically create a licensing agreement that benefits you the most. Do you want the client to pay per user or per machine it is installed on? There is a difference. The client could have 50 users in their office, but only 25 machines. You could do volume licensing. You could keep it simple and just charge the client a yearly fee of $5,000 (or the dollar figure of your choice.)

One last thing you want to think about is how are you going to enforce the license? Are you going to even bother?

Per user license

This is the type of license where the client pays you a fee every time they add a user to the system. For instance, SourceOffSite uses this option. If your company uses a product like SourceOffSite, your company would have to pay a fee for each user name logging into the system to use it. Many of our peers who develop commercial tools and frameworks use this option. They charge for each user installing and using the application on their machine.

Microsoft often uses this method where they offer a 5-pack or 10-pack license. It has angered many of us and our clients to have to purchase these types of licenses. We often view them as unnecessary. Now the shoe is on the other foot . You spent countless hours developing an application and now you want to make a little revenue off of it. How do you make that happen? Licensing. Companies like Microsoft spend millions of dollars on product research they need to keep this process going and licensing is an easy way for them to fund their next version or latest technology.

Per machine license

Per Machine or concurrent user licensing is another option you can offer your clients. This could be a good option if they have many users using only a limited number of machines. An example of this is a company that operates 24/7 and utilizes shift workers that log into the system. If you know this is how your client operates, they will probably be much more willing to purchase your product than to, in their eyes, be ‚“robbed ‚½ by charging per user.

Volume licensing

If you offer Per User or Per Machine licensing and your client has many users or machines, you may want to offer a volume discount on the fees involved. For instance for 1-4 users, no discount, 5-9 users a 5% discount, 10-24 users a 10% discount, 25-50 a 15% discount, more than 50 users contact the developer for pricing information.

License enforcement

There are many ways to enforce software license compliance. If you think one of your clients is abusing their license, contact the Business Software Alliance (BSA). They will investigate a company and charge them with software piracy. There are some very stiff penalties placed on the client if they are found guilty.

Because of the vastness of this topic, most of which is outside the scope of this book, we are only going to list a few of the other methods that could be used. It is up to you to investigate them

  • Legal and marketing control methods

  • Technology based control methods

  • Hardware based software protection keys

  • Encryption

For more detailed information on software license enforcement methods check out this link: ftp://ftp.ealaddin.com/pub/hasp/new_releases/docs/softwareprotection.pdf

Licensing third party products

This is a fairly simple matter. You have to abide by the Third Party Vendor ‚ s licensing agreement. They are all different. You need to read their licensing agreement very carefully . Most of the Visual FoxPro Third Party products have very liberal licensing agreements. Here ‚ s a sample from Stonefield for the Stonefield Database Toolkit (SDT) many of us use:

  SDT includes royalty-free source code for all routines. One copy is required  for each developer using it; special site license pricing is available.  

You would need to include wording in your contract that deals with the Third Party products you use to develop the system. If the client wants a copy of your code and you use SDT and you decide to give them the code, they need to purchase a copy of SDT. The client has to understand this isn ‚ t something they just get, it is an extra expense they are going to have to incur.




Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions
Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions
ISBN: 1930919328
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 232

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