Licensing FAQ

Please refer to the following pages to see all available packages, their features and pricing information:

• Subscriptions for Visual Studio Developers
• Subscriptions for Delphi/C++Builder Developers

All DevExpress products are sold based on a subscription model. This means that when you purchase one of Subscriptions, you receive 12 months of free updates for that product(s) from the date of purchase – be it a minor service update or a major new version. After the 12 month period and at your discretion, you can pay about 45% of original price to "renew" the subscription and receive another 12 months of free updates. If you choose not to renew, you can continue using the last version you obtained or are eligible to use. The 12 month time frame is merely for new versions/updates and has no relevance to rights of use (as long as the EULA is not violated).

Note that you can renew a subscription after it has expired. Renewal costs increase 30 days after expiration of your subscription (pricing increases on a monthly basis after the 13th month). Please contact our client services team if you have an expired subscription or if you need further clarification on the terms of our subscription.

Absolutely. You can continue to use products which you have licensed and paid for...as long as you require. When a subscription expires, it simply means that you will no longer be issued any product updates or new product releases.

An expired subscription can be renewed. If you do not renew your subscription on the 13th month after purchase, your renewal cost will increase on a monthly basis. Feel free to contact our client services team for more information on renewals and product costs once your subscription expires.

Absolutely.

Each developer that uses our products must have their own license. We don't license per machine, per server, or demand any royalties or run-time fees. For more information, you can read our End-User License Agreement. If you have a testing team and they need to compile the application, then those testers will also need a license each. Testers who just test the completed, compiled application (that is, use it much as an end-user does) do not need a license.

Yes. In fact you can do this yourself using our website once the company has purchased more than one license. Log in to the DevExpress website and select My Account | Manage & Assign Licenses where you can assign a particular license to a given email address (that's how we differentiate between developers). You also assign a password at the same time.

Absolutely.

To a certain extent. The EULA specifically states two, but to be honest we don't worry unless there's obvious piracy going on.

If no development is performed on the build machine and its sole purpose is to generate actual builds of your products, then no you do not need to purchase a separate license for the build machine. If however a developer uses the build machine for active development and this developer does not have a valid license to the products, then yes, he or she must acquire a license to said product.

Since a developer can install on several machines (see the previous answer), get a senior developer to install his license on the build machine. If you like, he becomes the "owner" of the product on that machine.

You should not install our products on deployment web servers. For such servers, it sufficient just to deploy the runtime libraries of our products with your applications.

No. The only information required to activate (actually, that should be "to install") is the email address and password associated with the license.

Yes, however the validation still has to be done. If the machine being activated is not connected to the internet, our installer displays an opaque data blob that should be sent to us (presumably on another machine), and we reply immediately with another opaque data blob that must be entered into the installer. Once that validation has checked out, the installer will proceed to install the product. The installer will tell you what to do and how to do it.

Like all software you purchase, we do not provide any warranty. In essence, we provide the software "as is". To be absolutely sure of what we do or do not provide, you must read the EULA.

However, when you purchase a license, you will have access to all upgrades and updates for a full year. You will also automatically have access to our support team. You can renew after the year is up. If you don't renew, you will no longer get free updates; however, you will continue to get support.

Developer Express does not charge any royalties for redistribution of components that have been integrated into applications which you engineer.

Of course, this only applies if you have a valid license to all products which are being used within your application.

Important Note: Developer Express engineers products that include "redistributables" and those that do not. Our EULAs fully outline whether a product includes redistributables and the terms under which redistribution is authorized.

Absolutely. You can modify our source code and redistribute the modified libraries. As you can imagine, this does not apply to situations in which you are modifying our code and repackaging our controls and selling competing controls. Please consult our EULA for additional information.

No, the source code is not redistributable, even if you change it. The only files you may distribute are explicitly listed in the EULA.

Support is provided by one of two methods: either by a web-based system we call the Support Center, or by email (support@devexpress.com). We aim to respond to all questions within one business day. Support via phone, IM, or chat is not provided. The support team may, in certain circumstances, decide to access your development machine using Remote Desktop or similar, but that's only decided on a case-by-case basis.

Support is only provided to a developer with a valid license.

Delivery of our products is by download only. We provide 3 major releases of our products a year, with about 3 - 5 minor releases in between. We send you an email when a new release is ready for download. Sometimes we make hotfixes available for certain issues: these are individually downloadable from the issue page in Support Center.

No. When you purchase a license, you get the right to download all releases for a full year for free. At the end of the year, you should renew the license in order to receive all the releases for the next year, and so on.

There are no general rules here: it really depends on the severity of the issue, whether there is a temporary workaround, etc. In most cases, you will be able to get a hotfix from support, or from the issue's page in Support Center. Sometimes, there's no possibility of a hotfix and you will have to wait for the next minor release. Since we publish releases every three weeks or so on average, it's unlikely you'd have to wait too long.

No, there is no such premium level of support. We endeavor to fix critical bugs (that is, those without a viable workaround or those visible to many customers) as soon as possible.

No, I'm afraid there isn't. We do not incorporate other people's code into our own; there are too many legal ramifications to cover, and to be honest we'd prefer implementing the solution to a given issue/suggestion ourselves than paying legal fees to cover those ramifications. We are, after all, developers; it says so in our company name.

If you are targeting .NET, then DXperience Enterprise and Universal contain all the source for the controls for all platforms (DevExpress does not ship source code for CodeRush, Report Server or Data Visualization Dashboard). Other .NET subscriptions ship without the source code.

All VCL subscriptions are available with full source code.

Yes, of course you can change the source. However, you would be then responsible for applying the same changes to the source every time we release a new minor/major version (and there could be upwards of 15 releases a year). Sometimes, we may rewrite or refactor our code such that it's no longer obvious how to apply your previous changes. Depending on how extensive your changes are, we might not be able to provide support.

You cannot circumvent our license agreement by providing non-licensed developers with controls you've altered by changing the source. Again, read the EULA to determine what you can or cannot do in this respect.

Obviously, we will not provide our signing keys for any assemblies you modify, so be aware of possible "DLL hell" problems that could occur on end-user machines if they have several apps from different vendors that use our controls.