Strutt Licencing Information

We have adopted a very ‘trust based’ licensing and security model for Strutt, based on both the ease of securing it, and our general philosophy about life. As we have noted elsewhere, our main motivation for selling Strutt is not to make a profit, but rather to help to offset a proportion of the not insubstantial ongoing development and maintenance costs.

Therefore, Strutt is not ‘strongly locked down’ – that is; there are no hardware locks or other things, there is no ‘network version’, and it can be installed it on as many machines as you like largely without restriction.

However, we sell Strutt using a ‘yearly lease’ model, which means you buy a license per user, per year. So there is a yearly fee for using Strutt, based on the number of people in your organisation who intend to use it. Each user can have it installed on multiple PCs; for example, a desktop and a laptop. (We do not intend for Strutt to be installed on ‘central’ machines to be used by multiple people – that is contrary to the spirit of our license agreement – if multiple people want to use it, put it on their machine so they don’t have to mess around using a separate computer every time they want to use Strutt, and pay us for their license, it’s really not that expensive...)

Nevertheless, in order to minimise ‘unauthorised use’ of Strutt it does two things;

1. It reports individual usages to an online database, so we can generate a report about who is using it, and from what domain/company they come from, and
2. It ‘expires’ 3 times a year, and requires a new unlocked version to be installed (and we update a lot of things at the same time). That way, if people decide they don’t want to pay for Strutt licenses, we would stop sending them updates, and eventually their copy stops working (well, actually, the menu system disappears, the functions still work, so all spreadsheets will still work).

So usually what we do, is every year, at license renewal time, we check each company and see how many licenses they have used in the last year, and negotiate and agree an ‘appropriate number’ moving forward for the following year.

So basically, a company might buy 10 licenses now based on their anticipated usage. If you install it on a few more machines for others to ‘try out’, that’s fine, we don’t mind people trying it out, and we’ll ignore that until next year. Then, when we review your company usage, if we discover that you’ve had fifteen people using it a lot, then we’ll say “how about you pay for 15 licenses moving forward”, and you’ll either say “yep, OK, we love Strutt and that seems fair”, or you’ll say “Yep, sorry, we’ll remove it from those five other users, and continue to use just the 10 licenses we have” (and then, if we discover you’re abused our trust and you’re using 15 licenses all the time, we’ll get cross).

We think that’s a pretty trusting and reasonable way to go about it, and hope that you won’t abuse our trust. In any case, since Strutt is basically pretty cheap, we reckon you won’t mind paying the license fee for all your users – since if Strutt doesn’t easily pay for itself on your projects in the matter of just a few hours or few days of usage, then you’re probably doing something wrong!