Wednesday, 1 February 2023

Software Licencing and Law

 For this project I require lots of different software, which I have previously covered, when I was updating my software I realised that because many of the existing software I have and use is a teacher/academic licence, this means they can be used for non-commercial work. This is currently ok as everything I am doing is only for my masters, and for studying and learning. However, should I continue to progress with this project and intend to release or sell it then the work would become commercial as it is intended for commercial or monetary advantage. This means that I could not use the current license I have and would either need to upgrade (which would be incredibly expensive). Because of this, I decided to create a spreadsheet with the expenses of each software I had planned to use along with the licence types. 


Software

Price

Previously Purchased Price

Licence Type

Full Licence Price

Agisoft

£62.71


Teacher Licence/non commercial

$179 Perpetual

Dragonframe

Already Had

£224.99

Teacher Licence/non commercial

305/Perpetual

ZBrush

Already Had

£420

Teacher Licence/non commercial

£802.80 - £322.80/ per annum

Autodesk - Maya, Mudbox, 3DsMax

Free Work Licence


Teacher Licence/non commercial

Maya - £1968 Per annum

3DsMax-£1968 Per annum

MudBox -£102 per annum

Houdini

Free Apprentice licence


Watermarked/non commercial

Full FX - £4495 Perpetual

Full core-£1995 Perpetual

Indie - £269 Per annum

Foundry - Nuke, Mari Modo

£168


Teacher Licence/non commercial

Nuke - £2499 Per Annum

NukeX - £3699 Per Annum

Nuke Indie - £399 Per Annum up to 100K

Adobe

Free Work Licence


Full/commercial

£51.98/mo

Quixel Mixer

Free


Full/commercial until over $1million - Part of Unreal Engine


PureRef

Free




Unreal Engine

Free


Full/commercial until over $1million


Krita

Free


Full/commercial


Blender

Free


Full/commercial







Courses

Price




Blender Course

£46.70




A lot of the software I had planned to use is on a teacher/academic licence, but I have found free alternatives  to most that work on an open licence and can be used commercially. Because of this, some of the software I had intended to be used may be changed for one of the free alternatives, this will save me time learning multiple software should I need to change them in future and stop the potential future cost associated with them. 


The software changes would be:

  • ZBrush to - Blender

  • Autodesk Suite to - Blender

  • Houdini to - Blender and After Effects 

  • Agisoft Metashape to - Full Licence 

  • Adobe stays - Can be used commercially 


Luckily there are lots of great free software available that I can use, Blender is a great option for me, as I have purchased the course to learn it and it also is a free open licence, it can also be used to create a lot of the different elements that I need meaning I would only need to focus on learning a single software. 


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