Personal Use vs Non Commercial - Any news

Alan Knight and I have been working with Cincom management on clarifying these issues.  

Management has been very supportive in our efforts to make sure we address the community concerns for the license and usage.

There have been a number of questions in this list and in other forums about exactly what's allowed under the Personal Use License. 

Here are some examples that we hope clarify things. These break down into a few different cases:

1. You write some code and use it yourself and don't redistribute it. That allowed, as long as you're using it according to the terms of the license, including that it's not for a revenue generating venture or for the operation of a business. If it's something that you hope might one day be a business, but it isn't yet and doesn't generate revenue, then that's still considered personal use.

If it's sort of a business or generates revenue but not very much, or even if you're just serious enough about it that you'd like to have support, then you'd need a commercial license. For things that don't generate very much money yet the Cincom VAR license is based on a percentage of your revenue, so you can sign up for that very cheaply.

If you're not sure if your usage would qualify as being for a revenue generating or business purpose, then you should contact Cincom. There are always gray areas, and we won't be unreasonable. For example, if you were writing something for a local charity or non-profit that you support, even though it technically generates revenue we'd normally allow that. But if the Gates foundation wants to use our products for a multi-million dollar project we'd like to be paid.

2. You write some code, put it under an open source license, and publish it to the public repository or make it available for download. That's allowed, as long as you're using it according to the terms of the license, including that it's not for a revenue generating venture or for the operation of a business. Same caveats as above.

3. You write some code, or use someone else's code, and it runs a web site or other service on the internet. That's allowed, as long as it's not for a revenue generating venture or for the operation of a business. So, running a wiki for some non-business purpose is fine. Running a wiki for support of your commercial product would require a commercial license. Same caveats as above.

4. You write some code and want to distribute it as an executable or image and virtual machine. That ought to be allowed, as long as you're not exposing Cincom intellectual property (including our sources, letting people use Cincom code for purposes other than that of running your application) but the license as it stands isn't clear about it. We're going to work with legal and management to make something that makes that usage and any restrictions on it clear and simple. And of course, this is only allowed if it's otherwise in agreement with the terms of the license, including not being for a revenue generating or business purpose, and the previous caveats apply.

We hope this is helpful, and if you have any more questions, scenarios, or ways we can make this clearer, we'd love to hear them.

Sincerely

                      Arden Thomas 

                      Alan Knight

Contacts:

Arden Thomas                                         Smalltalk Product Manager                                           a[hidden email]

Alan Knight                        Smalltalk Engineering Manager             [hidden email]

Suzanne Fortman               Smalltalk Program Director                                          [hidden email]