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.