I believe it’d be pointless. Countless companies do the same.

The point is: before you start using a library, read the license, and make sure you understand it.

It would be neat to create less free, but still standard, licence texts.

Then again, sellers probably don’t want you to understand the licence. In this case, those people sold you something you can’t use, and that you wouldn’t have bought had you read the licence beforehand.

Have you considered just adapting code from, for example, the ActiveMerchant libraries? They support many gateways, and so should provide you with many more than 4 supported gateway. Since it’s written in Ruby, it’s fairly straightforward to read even if you’re not a Ruby coder, and so should be quite easy to adapt to your product.

Just a thought..

Certainly a component vendor needs to protect themselves from license abuse, but there’s a huge difference between paying for 2 developer licenses and having 5 developers use it, and not allowing someone to use your royalty-free, compiled DLL if they also provide their application’s source code. The two are unrelated from my view.

When I worked for a component company about 30% of our customers tried to do this exact thing. The reason is that we charged per developer license fees. At a company with 5 developers, they only wanted to pay for 1 or 2 developers when they really need to pay for 5.

If you sell components, you need to protect yourself from people abusing your licensing. Developers, especially, will try to get around it anyway they can.

“Our license allows royalty free distribution…since we do not collect royalties, what we sell is the developer license.”

However, what I *thought* they were selling was the 4-figure license to their royalty-free version. But apparently their intent is to get a large chunk of money up-front for the royalty-free version *and* on the back-end for developer licenses. I mistakenly thought that with the high price up-front there was no back-end. Oops…

As an example: we offer a royalty-free version of DotNetInvoice, but once you’ve paid for it you’re royalty free – you don’t have to pay us again later for developer licenses.

Also, god knows our industry could use a LOT of slimming down of our license language.

Personally my company only requires that you do not say we wrote the software if you changed something, and that’s only there to make us not get sued by you writing malware or causing security issues for 3rd parties, other then that, for anything non-binding on us, anything goes.

However, as a person who writes components for people for a living, I understand their need to find a way to make money off their product.

I’m personally mystified why you can’t distribute your product as source with their product as a binary (unless you’re passing in a sort of activation code in source or something). Is there a technical/business reason here?