Third party software is a huge pain. We are using the new imaging software and I can build and run just fine but the rest of the office is hosed. This is all licensing based. I totally understand their need to make money. They only license the developer side, you can distribute all you like which is wonderful. So where is the problem?
We only have a couple of developers who will actually code against this third party library. Everyone else is working on other areas such a search, server communication, project support etc. They can't build and run the system without a license. You can't have a person casually contribute to the product.
Right now I am trying to get some code in place to check for a valid license and basically show them a blank area on the screen if they don't have a license. All the other developers will not be able to view any pages of an documents but will be able to do anything else they like with the system.
This will not affect QA as they will get a build from the nightly build box which will have the license allow the build to be distributed. This is not a long term solution, others need to be able to fully run the product to verify their work.
I really like this product, I just hate the pirates have ruined so many aspects of coding that I have to put up with a license system that makes sense for small shops where every touches the same areas of the code but not for larger places where people work in isolated small parts of a bigger system.
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