Frequently Asked Questions
- Is the license fee per-product or per-vendor? In other words, can I purchase one Install license and then use the product to deploy all of my company's software (multiple products)?
- What is the definition of "freeware" and "open source" for the purposes of the special binary-only license?
- What credit do I have to give to Wincent if I use Install to deploy my own product(s)?
- How can I be sure that Install will perform the particular task I have in mind for it?
- Why is the full-source license so expensive?
- Further questions
Is the license fee per-product or per-developer? In other words, can I purchase one Install license and then use the product to deploy all of my company's software (multiple products)?
The license fee is "per-vendor". If your company sells 20 different Mac OS X software products, you can purchase a single Install license and you will be granted the right to use Install to deploy as many of those products as you wish.
The definition of "the vendor" here will vary from customer to customer. If you are a lone developer working independently then you are the vendor. If your company purchases an install license, entering into the license agreement in the name of the company, then the company itself (and not you) is considered to be the licensee and therefore "the vendor". When used with opensource projects then the collective that works on the project is considered to be "the vendor".
Licenses are not transferrable, so if you enter into a license agreement as an individual developer and then later move to another company, then you may not transfer your license to the new company and use Install to deploy that company's products under the terms of your previous license. Similarly, if an open source project acquires an Install license and the project later forks then the forked project would need to obtain its own Install license (because "the vendor" would be different); in order to avoid acquiring another license you would need to demonstrate that the vendor was effectively unchanged (in other words, that the project has the same development team and affiliated organization).
What is the definition of "freeware" and "open source" for the purposes of the special binary-only license?
In order to qualify for the discounted binary-only license, the software to be deployed must be either "freeware" or "open source". Software is considered to be freeware if it is available free of charge, and it has full, unchanged functionality regardless of whether payment is made. Most software that is labelled as "shareware", "nagware", "donationware" or "commercial" does not satisfy this requirement.
Software which displays a reminder dialog asking for payments, even if it claims to be "free", is not considered to be freeware for the purposes of licensing Install, because the reminder dialog qualifies as changed functionality (those who donate don't see the dialog, those who don't donate do). If you are in any doubt about whether your software would qualify, please contact Wincent.
Software is considered to be "open source" if it is licensed under one of the approved licenses, the GNU GPL, GNU LGPL or the BSD license.
What credit do I have to give to Wincent if I use Install to deploy my own product(s)?
You may not strip any copyright notices from Install, regardless of the type of license that you enter into. The Install software itself, both in binary and source code form, is Copyright © by Wincent Colaiuta, 2003-2004, All rights reserved. You retain the authorship of and copyright to any permitted modifications that you make to Install (exactly what modifications are permitted varies in each license, so please consult the full license text for details).
What this means in practical terms is that:
- you may rename the Install application bundle itself (for example, you may wish to rename it from "Install.app" to "Install Our Product Name.app");
- if you choose to rename the bundle you are not obliged to maintain the word "Install" in the title;
- you may add your own Copyright attribution to the CFBundleGetInfoString and NSHumanReadableCopyright fields in the Install InfoPlist.strings file (or files, depending on whether localized variants exist), but you may not remove or edit the existing Copyright attributions to Wincent Colaiuta in those fields (for example, you may wish to add your own Copyright to the original string, "Install version 1.1, Copyright 2003-2004 Wincent Colaiuta.", so that it reads, "Install version 1.1, Copyright 2003-2004 Wincent Colaiuta. Our Product Name version 2.0, Copyright 2004 Our Company."; any such changes will be reflected in the version and copyright information shown about the installer in the Finder and/or in the "About Install" window);
- you may not change the CFBundleName or the CFBundleShortVersionString fields in the InfoPlist.strings file, nor may you alter or remove the CFBundleSignature field in the Info.plist file;
- you may replace the Install icon file with a custom icon of your own;
- you may not edit the Install MainMenu.nib file or otherwise make alterations which have the effect of disabling or removing the "Install website..." Menu Item in the Install Menu;
- you may edit, and optionally convert to RTFD format, the Credits.rtf file that is used to construct the "About Install" window when the corresponding Menu Item is selected; but you must preserve the text in that file which attributes "Installer engineering and design" to "Wincent Colaiuta". You may not remove the file unless you replace it with an equivalent RTFD file containing the same attribution. You may add additional lines to the file which attribute authorship for your own products to the corresponding authors, and if you have made modifications to Install as permitted by your particular license then you may add a line such as "Installer modifications" or "Installer customization" attributing authorship of the modifications to, for example, "Our Company";
- you are not required to provide an attribution to Wincent in your product documentation, supporting materials or website, although any such reference you might make to Wincent and to the Install website would be appreciated;
- You may not modify nor reverse engineer the binary data of the Installer executable itself.
How can I be sure that Install will perform the particular task I have in mind for it?
If after reading the feature listing on the Install website, looking at the sample applications and looking at the Install manual (which may further clarify the capabilities of the software for you), you are not sure whether Install has a feature or characteristic that you require, you can contact Wincent to request a preview, binary-only copy of Install.
If it turns out that Install does not have a function or feature that you require you can either purchase a binary+framework or full-source license as appropriate to enable you to implement the feature yourself, or you can make a request that Wincent add the feature to a future version of the product. I am extremely receptive to feedback and am always looking for ways that the software could be improved.
Why is the full-source license so expensive?
When you license a binary-only version of Install you are licensing a powerful deployment solution with a host of functionality and flexibility designed to make software installtion, updating and removal a breeze.
When you purchase a binary+framework license, you receive, in addition to the above, limited access to Wincent intellectual property in a human-readable format above and beyond that which you could access in a binary-only context.
When you purchase a full-source license, this limited access to Wincent intellectual property is greatly extended. The full-source license is expensive, and so is the binary+framework license (albeit to a lesser extent) because I consider this to be the value of access to that intellectual property.
For the majority of developers, the power and flexibility of the binary-only solution will be enough to meet their deployment needs, and they can benefit at a relatively low price from the hundreds of hours of Wincent development effort that have gone into developing, enhancing and refining Install.
Further questions
If you have further questions about licensing or about Install itself, please contact Wincent directly using the contact form.
