Licensing Questions

[brian]

* What agreements are required, and what access does each of them provide?

There are two types of agreements that need to be in place in order to commercialize a DICE based product.

1. Non-disclosure agreement:

TCAT Mutual NDA:

Protects both TCAT and the customer with regard to confidentiality of proprietary information.

A company that wants to look at our source code and have access to the developer areas of our forums is required to sign our mutual NDA. Once the NDA is in place, the sources are provided free of charge. Access to the sources is only provided to companies that have potential DICE based products in their pipeline - TCAT reserves the right to provide the source code only to those companies that are actually considering developing a DICE based product.


2. License Agreements:

Our license agreements serve two purposes:
1. To make sure our software source code is only used with our chips.
2. To make sure that customers have the necessary rights to use our software.

Driver License agreement:

A no-nonsense, royalty free license agreement that grants the customer a license to distribute TCAT DICE drivers and host software that is based on TCAT supplied sources, in binary form with their DICE based product application.

Firmware license agreement:

A no-nonsense, royalty free license agreement that grants the customer a license to distribute firmware binaries based on TCAT firmware source code, with their DICE based products.


* What is available if I don't sign any agreements?

You can purchase an EVM and evaluate the DICE without signing any agreements with TCAT.

Our Website (http://www.tctechnologies.tc) has a great deal of information, including EVM Design Files, EVM firmware binaries, DICE chip User Guides, Host Driver Binaries, and everything else needed for evaluation. The Firmware Development Environment is also available to download and examine (although it does not contain firmware source code).

We also have a public area of our forums where you will find a lot of non-developer related information.


* What does TCAT provide after signing?

We provide Firmware Source code, source code for Host API's, Utilities and Applications, up-to-date driver binaries and installers, and additional developer documents. Sources are made available via the TCAT Subversion repository.


NOTE: TCAT provides regular updated driver binaries and installers at no charge.


JUCE License (optional)
Many of our Host GUI Applications are based on the JUCE C++ API, which is provided by Raw Material Software. If vendors wish to redistribute the binary versions of the JUCE-based Host applications that are built by TCAT, then a JUCE license is not required. Otherwise, see this topic in the TCAT Forums http://www.tctechnologies.tc/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=48 and the JUCE website http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce

Contact Raw Material Software for JUCE licensing.