Licensing Questions

I'm looking at purchasing an enterprise licence for the WPF Property Grid control. I've reviewed the license agreement and I'd like to get clarity on some of the restrictions:

1. The website indicates that the property grid control can be distributed without royalty but this seems to be in conflict with the Section 2.4 of the license agreement.

2. Sections 2.4 (b) and (c) imply that any software that includes the control must be distributed free of charge. Can the control be used in commercial software? Can it be used in a tool that is included as part of a larger SDK?

 Jason 

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your questions - hopefully I can clarify a few points :-) First off, we need to push an updated version of our Property Grid out as we have changed the license but this is only in the nightly builds currently. I've attached the current license to this post so you can have a look.

In general, we have simplified the license as there were some points that were unclear or seemed in directly disagreement with how we want people to know our software is licensed. Generally this was because legal speak is just really strange at the best of times however we removed clauses that were causing the most confusion.

1. You absolutely can distribute without royalty. Effectively you just can't ship a competing product with it included (e.g. your own property grid control), include it in a software development kit (e.g. you sell a suite of WPF controls and include it). There's a couple of other points about not harming our reputation or trying to say the property grid is your IP. Nothing that forbids you including it in your software and providing it freely to others as part of your solution.

2.  These points were ones that we didn't fell read properly despite the law firm who drafted it thinking it was fine. We've subsequently removed them. You can charge for your software if it includes the WPF property grid :-)

If you are looking to include the control in an SDK then please email me at jd@mindscape.co.nz. We have put together custom licenses for vendors before who wished to do this (typically game middleware companies who want to provide SDK's for making great looking tools for the underlying platforms). We're completely open to negotiating terms if your organisation has specialised requirements for distribution. 

I hope that helps - do ping me an email if you'd like to discuss further,

John-Daniel Trask

Hi John, 

Thanks for the reply. The wording still seems somewhat obscure and restrictive, especially with respect to the enterprise license which we would likely purchase.

We plan to use the property grid in a game development tool that we use internally but that we may also provide to third party devlopers that may be developing a game on our behalf. One could argue that this is part of an SDK for game development, thus my concern.

We obviously have no interest in competing with or reselling the property grid as a stand alone control library for general application developement. We would also ensure that the source code would not leave our company.

I believe this is in line with the spirit of the license agreement but that it may be in violation of the specific wording. Can you please confirm this.

 Thanks,

Jason

Hi Jason,

Absolutely that would work in the spirit of the license :-) We have several game companies doing the same thing now. If it still causes concerns please do feel free to email me with a proposed change and we can work from that.

As long as the source code doesn't go outside the company and it's included as part of your tooling support then that's fine (I can't imagine it would be too useful for your end users to include IN their games unless Mario is about to visit Property Grid World :-)

I hope that helps - do let me know if there is anything else I can help with,

John-Daniel Trask