RTOS licensing: per developer licensing

For many companies, RTOS production licensing has always been a difficult and even somewhat annoying issue. In some cases this leads to selection of open source or free RTOS; however this has other significant problems like Copy-left, lack of technical support, less functionality or even danger for liabilities. Most Project Managers would thus prefer to use a commercial RTOS and modules like protocol stacks, but are afraid of recurring licensing prices and often complex production licensing conditions… even in the case of RTOS and stacks that are promoted as Royalty-free.

"RTOS, Embedded File Systems, GUI, TCP/IP stacks and USB are nowadays seen as a commodity and developers want easy and hassle-free access to this middleware. As a result the developer-based licensing model has quickly become very popular amongst our customers" says Glenn Moloney of INDES-IDS. 

Royalty free! = free production

They are many RTOS and middleware modules like protocol stacks, GUI’s and File system that are advertised as Royalty-free. However, this usually does not mean that production is free of charge. 

Even in the case of Royalty free licensing (as being offered by many RTOS & middleware vendors), it is still mandatory to buy out production rights (often up front) for each end product or product family that enters production. This means that even after a first project was completed and went into production, new licenses will have to be purchased for each new product, or product-line before it can enter production.

This means recurring costs, and in case of projects with low volumes, this results in a mismatch in economics. Also companies that perform many projects for third parties see themselves confronted with high base-costs for their projects and administrative overhead

The RTOS and middleware has become a commodity.

Now virtually all applications that are developed require communication interfaces like Ethernet or USB, or middleware like Embedded (Flash) File system or Graphical User interfaces. Such out-of-the-box software components have become a part of the base platform of many an application. This functionality has quickly become a commodity that Embedded Software Developers should have easy access to; without a worry about the economics of Production rights once a product get in Production.

Solution: Per-Developer Licensing

IAR Systems recognised this trend, and started to offer their (SEGGER-based) PowerPac RTOS and modules as a ‘tool’ that the developers buy the right to use for, without any worry about production volumes, production licenses and such.  We at INDES-IDS BV quickly saw the strong interest in this licensing model and succeeded in convincing SEGGER to make their full product offering available using the same model options.  The software platform can now be considered as a set of libraries that the developers buy access to and no further licensing obligations when the product goes into production.

Availability:

Developer-based licensing is now available immediately for all our SEGGER and IAR middleware:

-         Real-Time Kernel

-         Embedded (Flash) File Systems

-         TCP-IP v4/v6 stacks, - utilities and applications

-         USB stacks (both Host and Device) and classes

-         Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Other Licensing Models

Next to this new licensing model, we also continue to offer the 'classic' royalty-free production licensing models for SEGGER middleware. This can be more economic in case of a large group of developers that are working on a single product or product-family. In this model production licenses are purchased for an end-product, product family or even unlimited for a CPU family, independent of the number of engineers working on it.


Please do not hesitate to contact Glenn Moloney (Tel +31 345 545.535) to discuss your needs and pricing.

15-07-2010