More ESRI Licensing Issues

December 11th, 2006 · 12 Comments · ArcSDE, ESRI, ESRI Developer Network, GIS

Howard Butler had this problem back in October and now Paul Ramsey seems perplexed by the ESRI licensing agreement. I don’t believe we’ve heard anything back from the last time. If there is anything more confusing that ESRI licensing agreements, I’d like to see it. Our company is run by lawyers and they have trouble understanding some of the statements in the agreements.

Meh...

Tags:

12 responses so far ↓

1 Larry Renolds // Dec 11, 2006 at 11:45 am

One of our consultants was complaining about a licensing issue with one of their products they wanted to deliver to us. In the end we had to buy ArcGIS Engine runtime licenses to run the application.

I won’t be having another ArcEngine application anytime soon.
2 James Fee // Dec 11, 2006 at 11:49 am

Of course now Larry, once you have the runtime installed, you can run as many ArcGIS Engine apps as you need.
3 Paul Ramsey // Dec 11, 2006 at 12:39 pm

Not perplexed, just disappointed. People selling servers should make their client APIs available with as few restrictions as possible, so that their servers get heavily used and integrated in people’s daily business. Same goes for people pushing particular file formats. LizardTech has figured this out. Others have not. (Hey, is the API for file-based geodatabase out yet? The $1M question is: “what will the licensing be on the open FGDB API be?”)
4 Gonzo // Dec 11, 2006 at 2:34 pm

Larry, the runtime is what unlocks ArcObjects and should have been understood (by the consulting group) prior to deployment. It should be noted that folks that have ESRI Desktop installed on their desktop do not need the runtime, since the object libraries are already installed.
5 Larry Renolds // Dec 11, 2006 at 2:43 pm

Yea, we’ve seen that, but we are ArcGIS license deficient.

Maybe I’m just yerning for the days of MapObjects.
6 Jeff // Dec 11, 2006 at 3:33 pm

You mean “MapObjects LT”, because the standard MapObjects also needed some royalties to run …
7 wed // Dec 11, 2006 at 4:42 pm

True. But it was much less expensive. And it was easier to deploy.
8 Paul // Dec 12, 2006 at 5:23 pm

Mapobjects was the last ESRI product I actually enjoyed using and developing for….
9 wed // Dec 12, 2006 at 5:58 pm

Can’t really argue with that…

It was fun and it stuck to it’s premise of letting you “put a map in your app” rather than letting the map bludgeon your app, and your PC, to death.
10 sephi // Dec 14, 2006 at 7:56 am

Hi
Jame’s - great Blog…
another issue of licensing that i can’t understand.
is ArcIMS a subset of ArcGIS Server or is it still a different product? can I use developments built for AS in IMS (is IMS built with ArcObjects)?
thanks
11 matt wilkie // Dec 14, 2006 at 11:24 am

I recently had to open a tech support issue in order to locate the license restrictions (which has changed since 9.1) for the freely viewable and downloadable ArcGIS Developer Samples All of the samples have this line in their header: “See use restrictions at /arcgis/developerkit/userestrictions”, http://tinyurl.com/vgyx8, but said file is not available online. Or at least I couldn’t find it and apparently neither could the tech at ESRI Canada who responded to my query.

In any case, when, if ever, you get and install 9.2 you should find the full text of the licence at “C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\DeveloperKit\userestrictions.txt” after installation.

Oh, and the nature of the license change? Substantively the same (minor formatting changes ignored):

Old: “All rights reserved under the copyright laws of the United States.

You may freely redistribute and use this sample code, with or without modification.”

New: “All rights reserved … States and applicable international laws, treaties, and conventions.

You may freely … modification, provided you include the original copyright notice and use restrictions. “
12 Andy // Oct 13, 2008 at 3:36 am

Hey,

I have been able to develope and deploy a couple of extenstions to the desktop, and have a “Killer” app I would like to deploy as an Engine solution.

However, I am getting completely lost as to how to do it. I cannot find anything that goes beyond the sample walk through for “building” a map app, (which does not include the deployment).

Is there a cookbook walk through?

Andy…