The TAL Bar Code ActiveX Control is designed as a developer tool which means that it is licensed to the software developer that purchases it. As the developer, you are free to develop as many applications as you like with the control and to ship the Runtime portion of the control to your customers along with your application. You may also install the runtime portion of the control on other workstations in your organization without having to purchase any additional licenses or pay any additional royalties. This means that only the developer that purchased a license for the control may develop applications that use it.

The only restriction is that there is a limit of 10,000 copies of the runtime portion of the control control that you may distribute with any single application. If you expect to exceed the 10,000 copy limit, please contact TAL Technologies for more information on how to extend the number of copies of the control that you may distribute. Send inquiries to: sales@taltech.com

Also, if you have more than one developer that will be developing applications using the control, you will need to purchase a license for each developer.

Note: The primary reason why we have a distribution limit of 10,000 copies is to prevent a large software company like Microsoft from incorporating our bar code control into a popular database or word processing program (i.e. Microsoft Office) and essentially putting us out of business with our own product. In a case like the above, the 10,000 unit distribution limit also serves to protect developers that purchase the control for use in applications that are intended to be sold to other end users.

When you purchase the TAL Bar Code ActiveX control and install it using the Setup program that comes with the control, a special license file is installed on your PC that enables the control to work in "Design Mode" in most other software development tools like Visual Basic, C++, Word, Access, etc.. When you ship the control with an application that you develop, you may not include the license file and may only ship the actual OCX file and any supporting DLLs that are included with it. The License file is not required by the end users of your compiled applications and is used only to enable the control to work in a development environment. This means that any program that you develop and distribute that contains the ActiveX control will function without any problems on the end users workstation(s) however the end user will not be able to develop their own applications using the control.

A complete list of all the files that you are allowed to distribute is included in the users manual and in the on-line help file that comes with the control (as is a list of the files that you are not allowed to distribute).

When you use the control in a web based application (either server based or client based), the licensing works slightly differently.

If you develop a client side web application that uses the TAL Bar Code ActiveX control, any web client that opens a HTML page that references the control will need to have the control installed in their system locally. To facilitate this, the TAL Bar Code ActiveX control comes with a special CAB file that you can install on your web server along with sample HTML code that demonstrates how to set up the web page so that the bar code control will automatically be downloaded and installed on the users workstation the first time that they open a page that references the control. This CAB file also contains a special license file with the file name extension ".LPK" that allows the control to function only in Internet Explorer. If you create a client side web application and use the CAB file that is provides with the control to distribute it through your HTML code, then the license distribution limit of 10,000 copies does not apply. In other words, if you get more than 10,000 visitors to your web site and they all download the ActiveX control by way of the CAB file that is provided with the control, then you do not need to do anything. Essentially this means that there is no distribution limit on the control when it is used in a client side web based application.

For server side web based applications, you also do not need to worry about licensing issues. In a server side web based application, you install the complete ActiveX control package on the web server (along with the license file). In a server side web based application, you will only be running the code that calls the control on the web server and therefore it is never actually downloaded to any web clients so there are no licensing issues regarding the distribution of the control.

Related Links

View the License Agreement
Technical information about web applications using the TAL Bar Code ActiveX control