Telerik licensing demystified

Customers often ask if they need to purchase licenses just for the UI developers in their team or for all the devs on the team. The question is very common since most of our clients have large teams in which only a few of the team members work actively with UI controls and all the rest work with other parts of the solution. The question is so common that it was high time I blogged about it and gave our policy some extra publicity.

The answer is always the same: “No, you just need to get a license for the devs who will be working on the UI. Our products do NOT work with license keys and you can safely install them on any machine without worrying about license key errors. In this way the other team members such as designers, QAs, etc can also work on the solution.”

At this point prospect customers are ecstatic. You may be asking yourself, why? Well, it may be hard to believe, but few of the major UI tools vendor give this level of freedom to their clients and you need to get licenses even for the developers that are not working on the UI. In practical terms, that means you cannot install the product on any machine but your own; in the best case you can install the product on your home PC/laptop and your work PC and that’s it. So customers who have many developers working on a project have 2 options – either purchase licenses for all developers on the team OR completely separate the presentation layer from the business and data layers. Now let’s examine these 2 options:

Option 1 – purchase additional licenses for the other team members that will not be developing the UI - obviously buying 10 licenses instead of 1 is not a good thing for your business. You spend a lot for software that you don’t need and as a result you may end up not being able to purchase software that you actually need. For this reason for most of the dev teams this is not really an option.

Option 2 – separate the presentation layer from the business and data layers and thus completely isolate the UI work. Although in most projects you do have layering of the application, you don’t have a layering of the solution and everyone on the team is able to touch any part of the code and to compile the solution. Certainly, there are many good reasons for you to implement complete separation of the different layers, however most customers may not actually want to. When the project is small or when you’re under pressure to produce the solution you may not want to actually invest time in such granular separation of the application and the people that work on it – this involves process changes, culture changes…. and the luxurious good called “time”. As component vendors we are here to make your life easier and to give you maximum freedom and not to force you to change the way you work.

Realizing that the above options are not what developers need or want, the Teleirk team took a totally different approach to licensing. We decided that we do not put our customers’ projects at risk just to protect our software. Our tools work without license keys, thus all team members (including testers and designers) can work on the solution that uses Telerik RadControls without getting a license key error or exception even if they don’t have a license. To make things even more convenient for our clients we allow them to transfer a license from one developer to another. The mobility in the IT business is very high and IT professionals often change their jobs. There is also the fact that devs get reassigned from one project to another and managers need the extra flexibility to be able to transfer the licenses from one person to another. Telerik license holders can transfer a license from the convenience of their Client.net accounts. All they need to do is enter the email address of the new developer and the license will get automatically reassigned.

So, for all those of you out there who are looking for great UI controls + flexible licensing, Telerik can do something about it. We will make your life a bit easier, and your ROI higher.