Can Pex & Moles be used for Commercial Purposes.
If not, anyone has idea about when it will be for Commercial purpose.
I would like to know is it worth spending effort in a real business situation.
Thanks
Senthil Gandhi
GET A LAWYER TO REVIEW YOUR DECISION
I am not a lawyer.
As Jeff says read the licenses yourself.
For the academic (free) license, it's clear: NO, it's for personal, non-commercial (or academic) use only.
Academic Release
License: MSR-LA
Microsoft Research License Agreement, Non-Commercial Use Only
The MSDN-license (paid for) has:
Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools
License: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools Software Terms
And downloading that license has:
You may not
work around any technical limitations in the software;
reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that applicable law expressly permits, despite this limitation;
make more copies of the software than specified in this agreement or allowed by applicable law, despite this limitation;
publish the software for others to copy;
rent, lease or lend the software; or
use the software for commercial software hosting services.
So, provided you comply with these items, it seems that you can use the power tools version for checking commercial work.
Related
I'm currently studying at HW university, and the topic of my individual project (diploma research) is to develop a petrel plug-in by ocean framework. The aim of that project is to "automatically" locate and configure horizontal wells in particular way. But unfortunately to use ocean sdk a specialized license is needed. Our university has got petrel runtime license, but not the "developer" license. Is it possible to obtain some kind of academic license as it happens for microsoft products at dreamspark ? May be just for some limited period of time ?
You should go to http://www.ocean.slb.com, the Ocean website and use the Contact Us link to provide your request to Schlumberger. You use "HW" to identify your university. If it is Herriot Watt then I can tell you that in the past we gifted Ocean Developer licenses to your organization.
It seems to me that with the release of MonoTouch and Mono for Android Mono has gotten a lot more attention and the quality of the Mono runtime has increased significantly through these products offered by Xamarin.
But as it looks Xamarin is only focused on "mobile development" and not on classic Linux development or embedded Linux development. Are there any other companies which offer (commercial) support in this area?
I am a little bit worried because we are planing to develop a large product based on embedded Linux and Mono. Where can I find support if there are any problems?
You should speak to Xamarin. They do offer commercial support for Mono, as per the Mono website:
Commercial Support
Additionally, you could try talking with Lanedo
Miguel de Icaza has stated recently in various interviews and e-mails in mailing list that Xamarin are not offering consulting services outside the Mobile space.
However, Mono is open source, and as such, doesn't have any vendor lock-in. Virtually any opensource-based consulting firm could offer support contracts.
But I guess you want to know people who already have experience in supporting this software stack. Then, you have some particular alternatives:
Sinenomine. This company has been mentioned several times by Miguel de Icaza.
Lanedo. As mentioned by #TheNextMan, this company has done some consulting work for Xamarin too.
Any freelance individual. From time to time, companies requiring consulting just post to the mono mailing list, and they get contacted by potential mono contributors to do work on a contractual basis (an example: me).
What are the operating system and hardware requirements for Microsoft stress tools?
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7f944850-945f-4e60-b6d6-cf7341d7f9c3&displaylang=en#Requirements
Mentions the system requirements. is this what you are looking for.
I seem to end up evaluating a lot of software. This requires me to constantly install all kinds of things on my system. It creates a huge clutter and I spend a lot of time during the install process, and if I don't like it, then removing everything I've done. Much of my evaluation tends away from the features of the software being evaluated and toward how difficult it is to install. I'm sure I miss good software which may have actually been a better choice, because of this startup cost.
With the advent of VM software like VMWare Player and VirtualBox, it would be much easier to sell someone like me your software, if you just provided an image that I could load into the VM and run. I'd be looking at the features almost immediately rather than fighting with which revision of whatever. The VM would take care of all of this for me.
Am I missing something, or should vendors and OSS start distributing VMs for their wares?
Most of my evaluations are for server side software installed on Linux, so OS licensing is not the issue.
VMs require that the operating system have a valid license key. For free operating systems this wouldn't be an issue, but if you're developing for something like Windows machines, each time they send out a demo version of their software, they're sending out a license key that they would have to pay for.
This would be incredibly expensive for most companies.
The only downside I would say IMHO is the size of the images, if say you have a 20 MB application, do you really want to download/transfer an entire OS just for that application.
I would say a better approach would be to have a ready to go VM and then you simply take a snapshot (on Virtual Box, I assume similar feature exist in other players)
Then simply install the applciation inside your sandbox environment, and then just Zap it when done (i.e. return to your Snapshot)
Darknight
This can be done for softwre that runs on open source platforms, and VMware have a library of images which do just this (though the images that are used for evaluating commercial software is generally for infrastructure-type things that have very, very complex installation requirements):
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/
However, if the software is for the Windows platform, you don't really have the opportunity to do this, as Microsoft's Windows licensing would prevent it. Unless, you're Microsoft, of course, in which case you can in fact do this - and MS has done this to permit easier evaluation of such software as Visual Studio, SQL, and many others:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb738372.aspx?ppud=4
Novell has an appliance builder called Suse Studio that lets you pick the software you want, it builds out a VM with the software (and dependencies, etc) for you. You can then try out the VM, download it, etc.
Whether the software you're looking for is available or not is a different matter.
Disclaimer: I work for Novell (though not with the Suse team)
But yes, if you can deal with the OS licensing issues, or possibly host trial environments yourself, this is a very effective way for a vendor to demo their app. The problem is that all vendors don't always have the infrastructure (or lack the awareness) to do so.
Microsoft provides fully-provisioned VM's for time-limited trials of their software. So if you want to trial select Microsoft products in that manner, you can do that today.
There is no sign, though, that Microsoft will make this available to third party Windows software vendors.
In the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) world, you can get fully-provisioned virtual servers that include Windows and your software of interest on a pay-as-you-go basis, based on both Linux and Windows. For example, see Amazon Web Services
For windows, you may be better off developing a portable application that runs from a usb key. That is how Embarcadero distribute All Access. I received a 4 gb usb key that contained multiple applications. Most could be run straight from the key without installation. I believe Embarcadero will be licensing the technology at some stage.
If you are using a programming language such as Delphi or C++ with little in the way of external dependencies, a portable application is straight forward to develop. For .net, it is much harder, but can be done with Mono, or something like Virtual Application Studio.
I have a question about my MSDN Premium Subscription. This is what I want to setup:
Install Windows Server 2008 (maybe R2) on a Dev Box
Install System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (maybe R2) on the server.
Create several VMs hosted on the server (and maybe some other machines).
I would then use the VMs to Develop, Test and Demo my software (Nothing else)
My question is, on which of these can I use the licenses downloaded from my Subscription? I think #3 is clearly in the scope of the Subscription, but is the Server OS License? Is the Virtual Machine Manager?
Any opinions would be welcome. Any facts (with supporting links or docs) would be very appreciated.
From the main MSDN subscription page you can access the subscription information. The following was copied from that page. "Software Use Rights"
MSDN subscriptions are licensed on a per-user basis. One person can use the software to design, develop, test, or demonstrate his or her programs on any number of devices. Each person who uses the software this way needs a license.
According to this wikipedia article: MSDN
You can use your license to test and develop, but for production level code, you will need a different license.
In these kind of cases, if in doubt, I would give Microsoft a call. They should be able to give you a definite answer.
But as far as the license goes, it doesn't look like a problem and my best guess is that you actually can install the host OS, with SCVMM and everything else, as long as you are using that server purely for software development. IANAL, so if you want to have a definite answer: Call Microsoft.
In addition to Kim Major's answer, because of the per-user limitation (e.g. everyone working to a development SQL Server needs an MSDN license) it might be worth looking into an Microsoft Action Pack Subscription through the Partner Network. There are some very specific eligibility requirements but for small dev shops that are developing solutions with Microsoft products it is really useful. As you grow as an organisation you'd move towards Silver then Gold certification.
The basic premise is that Microsoft offer great value subscriptions to developers and get their pay out when your client pays for the production licenses to deploy your solution.
Once again, check the eligibility to be certain you qualify. There is a lot of misunderstanding around this offering.