not to get too abstract here, let’s consider the specific case of XtraReports. It’s a general purpose reporting solution with an interface based on WinForms. That means that just as easily as developing these reports manually using their IDE plugin in C#, we could also make our own language that would be interpreted by a wrapper around the SDK. And then the generation of that language could be done automatically by a 3rd party visual designer app, and for some subsets of projects the activity of the “user” of that app might not even closely resemble what we usually think of as “reports programmer” work. But ultimately the boundary between the “user” and “programmer” would be as hazy as between “user of Excel” and “Excel guru progammer”.
Has this sort of case of “borderline competition with the underlying SDK and toolchain” issue come up frequently in the past? Are there standard wordings to handle this which might be found in licenses for XtraReports and other packages that are exposed to similar threats?
Or am I here just dealing with an unusual case of insufficiently restricted product, so that instead of making more creative licenses XtraReports publisher ought to protect themselves by making the SDK less generically useful?
Don’t know the specific packages you’re talking about, and I can only vaguely see the “workaround” you’re describing, but I would guess that you cannot actually distribute any apps built on top of the developer SDK without another license.
There can also be other limitations on the SDK, but distribution of licensed code is pretty much always the key to these kinds of questions, since distribution/copying is what copyright law is built on, and in this case, if you’re building stuff on top of an SDK, you’re not just distributing whatever the SDK’s license would presumably allow you to distribute (if it even allows you to distribute anything at all).
are you trying to say that the standard solution to this problem is requiring royalties from every sale of an SDK-based app or a subscription fee from every computer that happens to run that app?
To use a more hypothetical but also more obvious example, consider a regular expressions SDK. The maker of that SDK licenses it to me, the developer, and so I can make apps that execute automatically generated regex against texts. So what if I now make my app into an SDK of its own and start selling it in competition with the original? Or I maybe will not sell the “generic regex SDK” wrapper but rather “special purpose, SQL code parsing regex SDK”. But still, underneath it all is the original SDK from somebody else.
I don’t understand your point about “on top of an SDK”. Everybody builds “on top of” by incorporating the SDK into their apps, it’s just that some resulting apps are more generically useful and hence more of a competition threat to the original than others.
Yes, as far as I know, any SDK that has a license you must purchase also requires a per-seat fee to distribute an application built with the SDK. This would be the case if the distributed application required a library supplied with the SDK at run-time, of course–if the SDK could be used to build an application that could be delivered without any code from the SDK, that application could typically be delivered without a separate fee. I imagine most SDK’s like this come in various bundles, with various price points, depending on if you plan to distribute 0, 100, or 10,000 copies.
I am using “SDK” very loosely here, but I think that the OP did as well.
Depends. Some vendors have free SDKs but require payed licenses if you want to distribute the generated programs, others have payed SDKs per dev-seat but give you free distribution of the output. Sometimes it’s all free, sometimes it’s a mix.
Ok.
I’m going to clarify my terms here; an SDK is a whole package of software that can be used to generate other software. There are two licensing issues to deal with; the license for obtaining/using/distributing the SDK itself and the license for the “output” of the SDK. For instance, Microsoft Visual Studio is a huge package that includes graphical editors, compilers, runtime libraries, documentation, header files etc. The license for VS includes the right to distribute programs compiled with VS, and the right to include some of the runtime components - without additional costs. It does not give you the right to distribute all parts of the VS environment, even as a dependency for your own code. For instance IIRC, you may not distribute the compiler, the editor or the VS standard header files with your program.
In your OP, it’s not directly clear whether you’ve actually got the right to distribute all the components you want to lift from the source SDK in your own SDK.
Here’s the short answer: Read the licensing material for whatever SDK you have.
Each individual business which sells SDKs is free to have whatever licensing terms they desire. And as a practical matter today, you’ll find that for various packages those terms are all over the map. Likewise so-called “open source.” Some of that stuff is real easy to build & sell on top of, others are very difficult.
Even if somebody here was able to give a complete and accurate breakdown of the various major categories of licensing arrangements, that wouldn’t answer the real question you have: If I have package X, what can I do with it?
If you want to know how you can sell the results of using package X, read package X’s license.
Because all these packages have different licenses, and it’s quite clear that you haven’t examined the issue very much as of yet. The general concept isn’t hard to get once you’ve read up on it a bit.
ETA: Also; you’ve had a hand full of answers that didn’t appeal to you and you just ignored them. If you think the 6th answer indicates some kind of special mind-reading ability just because it works best for you, I suggest you think harder about probabilities.
of the two responses given here, yours and Reno Nevada’s, which one did not appeal to me and got “ignored” (were you expecting stand up applause or something?)? Or are you engaging in telepathy outside the pit also?
code_grey, these kind of remarks are inappropriate for GQ. You have an unfortunate habit of getting snarky when people don’t answer your threads the way you want them answered. I’m giving you a formal instruction to drop the snark when responding to people who reply to your threads. Further behavior of this kind will result in a warning. I’m also closing this thread.