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cs4140 Notes: 14 Licensing Traps

·3 mins

Paying for commodity services makes sense.

Paying for application software licences may or may not make sense.

Paying for software libraries that your project will depend on is much more expensive than just the fee - the terms are usually a huge restriction on what you can do with your app.

Zero-Price Proprietary Licenses

Some software isn’t open source, but can be freely downloaded and used to some extent.

When considering dependencies that fall into this category it’s nessiary to carefully consider the terms under which the software is offered and the implications of using it.

Here are some specific things to look out for:

  • Do the conditions limit how this software can be used? Is it possible that you will ever run into those limitations? If so, how hard will it be to remove this dependency?
  • Are there any conditions under which a payware license is required. If there is any chance that you’ll meet those conditions you should evaluate the software as payware.
  • If full source code isn’t included, you may not be able to fix bugs or even figure out what the code does.
  • If full source code isn’t included, you may not be able to easily run the code on different hardware in the future.
  • If there are restrictions on use, you won’t be able to do those things without removing this dependency.
  • If the software is provided by Oracle, they may send you a bill for thousands of dollars per user and/or CPU core and send their lawyers after you if you don’t pay up.

More broadly, this stuff falls into two categories:

  • Abandoned historical artifacts.
  • Traps

Payware Proprietary Licenses

This software requires purchasing a license, and is generally restricted to use on specific computers or by specific people.

Adding payware dependencies is a business tradeoff, but the simple story is that once you do it you no longer own your program.

Buisness people will occasionally talk about a “build / buy tradeoff”. You can buy an office building. You can’t buy software - it only comes on short term leases.

Let’s consider FusionCharts. This is a JavaScript chart rendering library. For only $1899/year you can use this for up to 5 developers, as long as you don’t charge a subscription fee to end users. If you use this dependency, those requirements now apply to your whole project: No more than 5 developers, no subscription fees. Honestly that seems nuts even if there weren’t other charting libs.

“Platform” dependencies are especially pernicious. If you build an application specifically for Microsoft Sharepoint or Amazon AWS, then that’s the only place it’s ever going to run without effectively doing a from-scratch rewrite.

License Auditing #

Tools like License Auditor or Organization License Audit can help verify that your depedencies have reasonable licenses.

Meeting Stuff #

  • Are all quiz apps deployed?
  • Has everyone contacted their customer and scheduled an initial meeting?
  • Any questions on customer / meeting / semester project?

Team meetings, go!

  • If anyone has questions on quiz app technical stuff, I’d be happy to help during the meeting time.