You are here: Home Licensing Licensing FAQ Concerning the new Coin PEL (v2) Coin PEL v2 summary

So, how about a summary in English instead of Legalese?

My pleasure, here you go. Paragraph by paragraph (note: everything that is said about Coin below also applies to the So* libraries and Dime/Profit):

After the definition of what the license is about, and whom it concerns, it is stated that SIM is and remains the copyright holder and owner of Coin. The license gives you the right to use the software, we do not sell it to you.

You are getting a license for one individual: you, or somebody in your company. We are deliberately not restrictive about this "in your company", so it's perfectly okay to acquire a company license and have an external consultant be the actual Coin developer. The important part is the idea that it is a personal developer license, not a "site license" or a company-wide license. So one license is needed for each developer working on Coin-related development.

The license is valid for one year, after which you will get a renewal offer from us.

You are allowed to use Coin to develop your product, whatever that is, except if you are developing a directly competing product.

You can ship binary version of Coin, modified or unmodified, with your product. You are also allowed to distribute the source code, but only in unmodified form. If you have changed anything, you must distribute the original source code plus patches. (See also next question.)

You will get one year of free upgrades, and you are entitled to developer support for that period.

Now if you don't extend your license after one year, you can of course still ship your product. You are also allowed to continue doing development using the last version of Coin that was released while you had a valid license. You will not get any more updates, and you will not get any more support.

The rest is off-the-shelf legal provisions, standard clauses in the (unexpected) case of a lawsuit, statement that we don't take any warranty (you are responsible for e.g. loss of data) etc.

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