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In my last blog post about Q3 I forgot to mention two VERY VERY important benefits for customers: firstly, we changed the license agreement and secondly, we started to ship the source of the r.a.d.controls with every purchase of a Subscription license (the one that costs $999 per developer).

Over the last few months many customers contacted us with questions about our redistribution policies as our license agreement wasn't very clear cut about what is acceptable and what isn't. If you remember, I blogged about this not long ago in an attempt to clarify our policies: Demystifying the telerik r.a.d.controls re-distribution rights and limitations. But, as one customer prudently noted "if it ain't in writing, it ain't for real!" So we decided to improve the language and straightened things out in a way to accommodate you all. You can review the agreement at: http://www.telerik.com/purchase/license-agreement.aspx As you will notice, we have clearly articulated that redistribution of any of the telerik components is OK which opens the gates for ISVs who are eager to freely ship our products as part of their solutions. However, like I said in my previous blog entry, there are certain rare cases where the end-users of those packaged/commercial solutions would need to work with the telerik design-time product and you wouldn't be covered by the standard agreement. In any case, I recommend you take a few minutes to go through the new agreement and get a better understanding of the changes.

Well, how about that source code? For years, our policy was not to offer source code of our tools with the purchase of a single copy of r.a.d.controls. We required that customers should purchase 5 or more licenses in order to obtain access to the source. It was a bit of a turn-off for smaller companies and sole developers as the price of the source proved to be quite significant and surely out of budget. Acknowledging the fact that customers need the source for various security or regulation reasons and firmly believing that our source would be a great educational resource for telerik customers, we finally decided to change our policy. With this year's Q3, everyone who purchases a r.a.d.controls Single Developer Subscription License will receive the full C# source code along with its JavaScript counterpart. The latter is extremely valuable since a good deal of the magic happens on the client. Needless to say, as a courtesy to our existing customers, we have added the source files to all people with an active subscription and as long as that subscription is in good standing, clients will continue to receive source code updates as well.

Perhaps, now is the time to make a few notes about the source code:
- it is offered for security, educational and troubleshooting purposes ONLY
- modified source is NOT supported. If you make changes to the controls and add extra functionality, that's at your own risk. Our preference is to fix things and add features in official builds since everyone benefits from it and is sure to work with supported versions.
- For production use we request customers to use the compiled assemblies and obfuscated JS files which come with the developer build

I hope this makes sense for all customers and you understand the simple reason behind these minor restrictions. If everyone starts customizing our controls, s/he will likely hit numerous obstacles as it's not easy to ensure that everything works right and doesn't interfere with something else in the product or in other controls. We'll likely have a really hard time debugging those customized versions and as a result we simply won't be able to support our products well.

I'd be really happy to hear your thoughts on those two key changes in our policies and whether these two changes really are a benefit for you.


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About the Author

Vassil Terziev

As Chief Innovation Officer at Progress, Vassil Terziev is responsible for identifying growth strategies and new market opportunities, as well as promoting internal innovation.

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