Just want to follow up Dmitry's post Graphics Mill 5.0: Coming Soon.
The upcoming Graphics Mill release will introduce not just new features, but new licensing policy. This is what I would like to tell in this post about.
Briefly speaking, there are two essential changes:
- Graphics Mill will be splitted into Std and Pro editions.
- Licensing policy becomes closer to industry standards.
Std and Pro editions
When we analyzed how our customers are using Graphics Mill we have realized that some of advanced features we proud of are useful not for all of our customers. Most of features which make Graphics Mill unique are especially important for customer who build applications for printing business. But these features are not really important for those who develop other kind of applications. Why such customer should purchase unnecessary functionality?
That's why we decided to create two editions:
- Std edition will include all features necessary for general purpose imaging applications. For example:
- Basic imaging functionality (image resize, crop, rotate, etc).
- Support of common image formats like JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, etc.
- Visual controls (both for Windows and Web development).
- Text rendering (including multiline and formatted text), as well as other drawing features.
- All addons except of Advanced PSD.
- Pro edition will include features of Std edition + print business specific functionality, namely:
- PDF output.
- Multi-channel and multipage TIFF support.
- Color management (ICC profiles, etc)
- CMYK color space and extended pixel formats (16 bits per channel)
- x64 version
- OpenMP-powered resize (parallel computations).
- Advanced PSD addon
As you can notice, we decided to include addons in editions to make things simpler.
Licensing model changes
Our current licensing may seem to be not very consistent. It defines different rules for Windows and Web applications, and may be a bit unclear if you compare it with competitors. This licensing model is a kind of legacy, and it is a time to follow the same rules as other imaging libraries vendors do.
The main thing we did - we separated a right to develop application using Graphics Mill (so-called SDK license) and a right to run application with Graphics Mill in production environment (so-called deployment license). So now the licensing model looks as follows.
- To include Graphics Mill into application of any type you should purchase SDK license (which is licensed per developer).
- To distribute application you should have an appropriate number of deployment licenses:
- If this is an end-user desktop Windows application, royalty-free deployment license is included into SDK.
- If this is a web application, deployment license should be purchased per each server.
- If this is a kiosk application (i.e. target computer is accessible in a public place by multiple people), special deployment licensing is required.
So these are the main changes in licensing model of Graphics Mill. If anything is unclear, feel free to post a comment. I will be happy to clarify all your questions.