License questions

[baqqqia]

Here are some questions from the license that I'm confused about:

2. LICENSE GRANT, USE AND OWNERSHIP
...
(i) to use the Software in accordance with the Documentation solely for non-production purposes of Licensee's internal business operations, development, evaluation, and education,

4. CONFIDENTIALITY.
...
In no event shall Licensee use the Software or any Confidential Information to develop, manufacture, market, sell, or distribute any product or service.

Also, this was said on your blog a couple a years ago http://blog.springsource.com/2009/05...uite-now-free/:

What does “free�? actually mean?
...
STS is available at no cost and free for all development purposes; no strings attached. It is licensed under a commercial license, which you can review here.

where the last word "here" is a link to an access-denied page: http://www.springsource.com/node/406.

So, what are the terms at the end? Can a person download STS, build an application (e.g. Groovy app or a Grails app or anything that you can build by hand (just with more hassle and time) and consider it free) and then distribute that - e.g. sell that software or publish on a public Web server or something along these lines?

In other words - I find the above terms quite ambiguous. "non-production purposes of Licensee's ... development" - what is non-production development? "In no event shall Licensee use the Software ... to ... distribute any product or service" - so you cannot give your client an STS-made Grails site to publish it? Or even make your own personal site and hang it on some VPS Web server?

[Christian Dupuis]

Hi,

you can safely use STS to develop applications for production or sell. The license restrictions applies to STS which in turn doesn't make too much sense as you'll probably will not deploy an IDE on your production servers.

We use the same license for certain editions of tc Server which is a server runtime. In this case the "production exclusion" makes more sense.

In short: you can use STS for anything you like; except for re-distribution which is not allowed.

HTH

Christian

[baqqqia]

Thanks for the clarification Christian. I kind of understand your one-license policy, but it is very confusing. What you said doesn't explain the second quote (from item 4 in the license) - when somebody says "develop", that regularly means a completely different thing then "incorporating" something into a product or any of the words you used ("deploying", "distribution"). I would completely understand if license said "you cannot use any part of STS or tcServer or whatever".