Hi everyone,
Very Random Question. In my spare time I have developing a series of quite long maxscripts that are very specific to architectural visualisation. They make my life a lot easier! But many of them are thousands of lines long.
After a friend saw me using them word spread to a handful of companies and after demonstrating them they wanted to know if I would contemplate licensing mysscripts out to them out to them.
Now this obviously feels like a wonderful opportunity, but legally am I allowed to charge a fee for my scripts to be used by other companies, on the basis of owning a 3DSMax license myself.
All the scripts are entirely written by myself and a entirely Maxscript, and use no 3rd party development package at all. Given I have a max license, can I in turn license out these scripts that I have been spending months developing? Or will I be breaking anything to do with the purchase agreement that I have with Autodesk.
The reason I ask is because even after numerous calls, no one that I have got through to at Autodesk has been able to tell me the answer!
If I cannot legally license the maxscripts, then do I just charge them a development fee and develop the entire tool suit for them from scratch?
Please any light shed on this matter would be so so helpfuil, even if you do not know the answer, if you know who I should contact at autodesk it would be equally useful!
Thanks for your time everyone!
Everzen
I never heard of a “developer license” or that kind of stuff.
Quite a few people are charging for their scripts.
My guess is:
maxScripts don’t contain any runtime-libraries – they are text files.
So there is nothing to license ?
Interesting question.
Georg
yes you shouldnt have any problem many others do this
congrats on the sale
You should think form the perspective of a programmer. Do they have any licensing issues selling their programs coded in Visual Basic/C#/Java/Flash etc? They don’t so shouldn’t do we!
You have a Max license so you should be fine.
Thanks,
Anton
This is what I hoped was going to be the answer, and thanks for taking the time to reply.
I am going to continue chasing Autodesk for a final answer, casue it is not something that I want to find out actually breaks a contract or the licensing agreement that I hold with Autodesk!
It is very uplifting to hear that there are other people out there who are adopting these licensing arragement! I will post here with confirmation if I get a definite answer from Autodesk.
Your replies have made my day a lot happier though!
Thanks everyone,
EverZen
The simple answer is review the 3dsmax EULA (End User License Agreement). This dictates your rights as a user and what you can and can’t do with the tools. If the EULA doesn’t specify that Maxscripts can’t be sold then you are good to go, ie. if the EULA doesn’t restrict it then it is typically legal to do so.
-Eric
Selling Max scripts is just fine. It is part of what I do. Writting a max script is no different then using Max to make a model or a final rendered output.
The only type of Autodesk license that would not allow you to develop your own commercial maxscripts would be an academic license, as far as I know. You could use an academic license to learn maxscript, but not to develop anything commercially.
A commercial 3ds max license, on the other hand, is specifically intended to be used for you to develop your own content, including scripting/artwork/models/materials/etc. There are several features built into the very first implementation of Maxscript that were specifically designed to accomodate commercial script development. The most obvious of these is the ‘.mse’ encrypted file format, which allows a script’s code to be executed, but never opened/viewed/read by an end user.
Another type of license is the Not-For-Resale (NFR) license available through the Autodesk Developer’s Network (ADN) program. This program essentially allows relatively inexpensive access to past/current versions of Autodesk software in software and training development only, and does not allow for commercial 3D graphics/resources production. Only if you were a full time developer/programmer or training producer would this be useful to you, as you would not be able to work on commercial graphics projects with it. You would still need a commercial license for that.