Licensing¶
MCUT is available under an Open Source license as well as a commercial license. Users choosing to use MCUT under the free-of-charge Open Source license have to comply to its terms, otherwise they have to buy a commercial license.
The Open Source license is the GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 3 (LGPL).
Below is a brief overview of the license scheme and the rights given to users.
Open source license¶
The code is released under the GPL in order to protect its commercial value. This allows for commercialisation, which guarantees long term support, maintenance and further developments of the code for the benefit of the project and its users.
LGPL primer
In general, users of code that is licensed under LGPL must:
- Include a copy of the full license text and the original copyright notice
- Make available the source updates when distributing a derivative work based on the licensed sofware
- License any derivative works of the sofware under the same or later version of the LGPL or GPL as described above
In sum, the LGPL license gives you the right to use and copy the source code of MCUT freely. It is also possible to modify the MCUT code under the condition that the resulting modifications are released as source code under LGPL with any binary distribution of your software that uses these LGPL parts.
Commercial license¶
The commercial license option is for users that wish to use MCUT in their products for commercial purposes but do not wish to release their software under the LGPL. You can buy a commercial license from CutDigital Enterprise. The commercial offer is adapted based on company size (number of employees).
Philosophy¶
The licensing model of MCUT is motivated by the desire to eliminate the access costs for users/creators of derivative works by minimising the restrictions posed by strict copyright rules.
“Access costs” refers to expenses for users that wish to e.g. do research or create a derivative work—such as their own 3D mesh processing tool(s), a copy of MCUT modified to fix a bug, or add a feature—but are unable (or perhaps even unwilling) to pay for the right to do so.
This reduction of access costs also aims to increase usage by gaining “market share”, leading to even more frequent creation of derivative works. The by-product of this increased usage is further awareness e.g. through recommendations via networks, forums, word-of-mouth etc. The openness of MCUT´s development and its diverse user-base will also garner additional trust as a reliable tool that is also viable for commercial use.
Being open also creates enormous value. For example, in the context of scientific research, MCUT´s functionality is shared for free and anyone with access to the source code can generate data (e.g. meshes, performance stats etc), develop simulations, and prototype geometry processing ideas amongst others. The original project may also receive feedback and potential improvements on the original design from the user community.