You my have seen the news that Embarcadero have launched 1 Year Term Licenses for C++Builder Professional and Enterprise. We’ve had a few questions from people about these, so wanted to repeat the answers here for anyone else who might be wondering what these are about.
Perpetual vs Term
In many ways, these are similar to the normal Perpetual license that you might be used to. You get 12 months of Updates and new versions, the feature sets are the same, etc. Also, after 12 months, you can choose to renew for another 12 months of Updates and new versions, just like the Perpetual licenses that have been around forever.
The big difference is what happens if you don’t renew. With the existing Perpetual licenses, your product continues to work, you just don’t receive any new versions that are released. However, with the Term license, if you choose not to renew, then the product will stop working.
As a result the Term licenses are great in some situations, but not so much in others. For example, one customer we know is looking at this for a project where they have a number of developers helping on the initial development of a project, then will scale back to just a couple of longer-term developers working on on-going maintenance. It makes much more financial sense for them to give the longer-term developers Perpetual licenses, but the others can use a less expensive 1 year Term license.
So this just provides another option. The Perpetual licenses are not going away, but in some situations it may make better sense to look at Term licenses.
If you’re not sure or have any questions, please let us know.
