computers should be less friendly

I was able to ask Zia Yusuf this morning about some of the restrictions around the SAP Subscription License.  paraphrasing his answer a bit:

The license you are granted is a development license if you intend to resell or license any of your solutions you create you need to get a different license from SAP

So what this means is that if you develop something on the subscription program you cannot resell it.  The EULA is pretty clear in this regard:

If You wish to use an Add-On or Consuming Product Application created by You in a production environment, or to otherwise commercialize and/or distribute that Add-On or Consuming Product Application, You must first enter into a separate agreement with SAP.  Under this Agreement You are not entitled to: … license sell, offer to sell, transfer, rent, lease, distribute and/or otherwise make available the SAP Software and/or any Add-On to third parties. [source: EULA]

Thanks to Eddie for the link to the EULA.

Basically this means if you want to sell something you need a new license and probably any open source work would also meet with a cease and desist from the SAP legal team. 

To compare this to another player in the industry the EULA associated with the MSDN subscription appears to not make any distinctions like this.  Granted the pricing for the MSDN subscription is a bit higher, New $10,939, then $3,499 / year thereafter.  Compared to the SDN Subscription cost which is $2,300 / year.  I wonder how the MSDN numbers compare with the cost of the SAP license to resell your solutions.

I think the subscription is a great idea and a big step forward for SAP but, to become a “platform company” they need to make it easier(cheaper being part of this) to get started in the ISV market.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 5:33 am and is filed under ABAP, SAP, SDN blogger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.