Perforce Licensing FAQ

Question 1: Our legal department has some changes for your End User License Agreement (EULA). Is that ok?

Probably not. We strongly prefer to have the same agreement with all of our customers, so that we can direct our efforts at fulfilling our obligations, rather than tracking them. We've worked very hard to make sure our EULA is fair in order to protect both you and us. Our standard prices reflect the products, services, and other obligations in our standard EULA.

There are some issues not covered by our EULA or handled in ways that need explaining. On the rest of this page, we attempt to answer the questions frequently raised by legal departments. If you still have questions, feel free to contact us.

Public Reference

Question 2: Your EULA says that Perforce can use our company name as a public reference. What does that mean? Can we change that?

We list a small number of our customers on our website with links back to the customers' sites. Before we disclose any other information about our customers (such as featuring a customer on one of our web pages), we first work with the customer to get both permission and editorial approval.

If you don't want us to mention your company name at all, just let us know and we'll provide you with a one-page addendum to the EULA. You can do that at any time.

Support and Renewal

Question 3: Does your EULA obligate us to purchase support renewal or anything else?

No. Technical support and maintenance upgrades for the first year are included in the purchase price. Thereafter it is optional.

Question 4: If support expires, can we still use the licenses?

Yes. You can continue to use the product indefinitely, but you no longer get upgrades or technical support.

Question 5: Can I renew upgrades without technical support? What about technical support without upgrades?

Yes and No. The price of support renewal is split 50/50 between product upgrades and access to technical support. Most customers renew both, but it is possible to renew upgrades alone. We don't allow you to renew technical support without upgrades, because many support problems can only be solved by upgrading. For this very reason, one of of the provisions of the EULA is that you will try to keep current on maintenance upgrades.

Question 6: If we renew 'upgrades' only, can we get help installing the new license file?

Certainly.

Question 7: We've downsized and have fewer people using Perforce now. Can we renew support for fewer licenses?

Yes. We're sorry to hear that.

Question 8: Can we get a better technical support schedule? (24/7 support, ten-minute turnaround time, or something along those lines.)

We're proud to say that we're renowned throughout the SCM industry for the speed, skill, and responsiveness of our technical support staff. If you'd like to hear this from our customers instead of from us, some of their comments are reproduced in our customer testimonials, or you can chat with them on our Perforce User email list.

However, if you still feel you need a more responsive support schedule than the standard one we describe in the EULA, we'll be happy to discuss a custom support offering. Contact us and let us know what your needs are.

Question 9: Why do we have to keep current with the latest Perforce release?

You don't if you don't want to, and we can appreciate that sometimes you'd prefer sticking with a known entity rather than installing an upgrade. However, we're better able to support you if you move along to newer releases with the older problems fixed, and we reserve the right to ask you to make your best effort to upgrade to the latest version before we answer your support questions. If you've installed the upgrade and you're in the process of testing it but haven't cut over to it in production yet, we'd certainly consider that to be a "best effort."

Pricing

Question 10: Does the downloadable 2-user version mean that we get the first two commercial licenses for free?

No. Sorry.

Question 11: Do you offer floating licenses? How about a site license?

No. We charge $900 per human being, plain and simple.

We believe that floating licenses merely add guesswork to the purchasing process and would require us to charge more anyhow. If you really have users that make very infrequent use of the system, you are free to delete them from the server to make room for other infrequent users.

Site licenses are time consuming, tricky arrangements in this era of mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs. All of our customers license each human being, even our largest customers with more than 5,000 users.

Question 12: Can we put some sort of upper limit on the support renewal fees?

We're not willing to do that, and here's why. In today's highly competitive market for top-notch engineers, it is difficult to predict the cost of providing technical support. If we cap the support fees, we might have to provide support at a loss and make up the shortfall by overcharging our new customers, which wouldn't be fair. The EULA limits us to charging you the "then-current" price for support renewal, which means we can't charge you any more than we do new customers. If we tried to price-gouge both you and our new customers on support fees, we won't have any new customers, which is not an attractive course for us to pursue.

Question 13: We have many divisions. How do we get the cumulative pricing?

The tiered pricing is bound to a single EULA and billing address. So if your company has many divisions but wants to take advantage of the lower price tiers, all divisions will have to work with the division that signed the EULA.

When we get an inquiry from a company that is already a customer, we generally inform them that another division is using Perforce and that they can save money by sharing their EULA.

Question 14: What forms of payment are acceptable, and what are your payment terms?

We accept cash, check, credit card, or wire, though so far we've only received a single $2 bill in cash (our first sale). We take US dollars or the equivalent amount in Euros, the currency of European Union.

Our terms are 30 days net. We need your purchase order to say so.

We will ship given a purchase order and signed EULA, but if you are a new customer with no payment history we will issue you a 60 day temporary license file. When we receive actual payment you'll get the permanent license file.

Licensing Forms

Question 15: Why aren't all the licensing forms online?

So as to be unobtrusive, the implementation of our licensing enforcement doesn't cover certain areas, and sometimes we require you to sign a form promising that you're still in compliance with the EULA. This is the case for creating a duplicate (backup) server, changing the server address, and adding a free user license for automated scripts.

Because of the potential for mistakes, we really want to hear from you, so we ask that you contact our licensing or support departments before we provide the form.

Question 16: Why do you ask for the port number?

We ask for the server's IP address and TCP port number so that we can issue a license file that can only be used for one installation.

Question 17: What if we want to change our server?

Just ask us if you need to move your Perforce server from one machine to another (and must change the TCP/IP address). We'll send you a new license file after we have you sign a form promising you'll retire the old license file.

Assignment

Question 18: We're a big corporation with lots of subsidiaries. Are the limitations on assignment and delegation going to be a problem when we want to transfer our licenses from one subsidiary to another?

Yes. They're intended to be, because we don't want to give our customers unrestricted permission to transfer licenses to subsidiaries. We could envision a scenario where a large corporation with many subsidiaries purchases a small Perforce license and moves it between subsidiaries every few months as each successive subsidiary undertakes a new software development effort, and that's not what we intend to accomplish with the EULA.

However, we do say that you may transfer the licenses with our consent, and we say that our consent won't be unreasonably withheld. If, for example, one of your subsidiaries were taking over a particular set of software maintenance responsibilities from another, it would probably be unreasonable of us to withhold our consent to a transfer. But we want to make these decisions on a case-by-case basis, and that's why we don't want to give you blanket permission.

Changing the EULA

Question 19: Can we remove or change the clause that gives exclusive jurisdiction to the courts of Alameda County, California?

We understand that you'd prefer to conduct any litigation under this contract on your home turf, but we hope you'll understand that we would too, for the very same reasons. We'd like to mention two mitigating factors: Number one, our local courts are very familiar with software-industry issues, since there are a great many software firms in Alameda County; we're confident that any legal action would get a fair shake here. Number two, we have never had any sort of litigation with any of our customers.

Question 20: Can you make the grant of license include the word "perpetual?"

We prefer to use more precise language. In the "Survival Provisions" paragraph of the "Term and Termination" section, the EULA states that the license (that is, the permission we grant you to use our software) survives termination of the agreement unless it's terminated because you've breached some provision of it. For example, if the EULA terminates because you haven't paid us what you owe us, we can revoke the license. However, if it terminates for some other reason than a breach on your part, the license remains in force.

Question 21: Could you add a warranty that there are no Trojan horses or viruses in the software?

We already assume the risk of a virus that prevents the software from working properly, since we warrant that the software is in substantial compliance with the documentation. We maintain a highly secure site, and that there has never been a virus or Trojan horse in our downloadable files. Further, the copy of our software that you downloaded for evaluation purposes is the very same copy that you'll be running in production once you sign the EULA and we issue you a license file. If there were any viruses in the software, they would most likely make themselves known before you finish your evaluation.

Question 22: Ok, how about a warranty that there are no defects in the media on which the software is delivered?

Perforce is delivered electronically. Therefore, there's just no good reason to warrant anything about our media, because we don't have any media. (There is a compelling reason for this besides mere convenience: delivering software electronically avoids sales taxes, which is cheaper for you and easier for us.)

Question 23: Can we have an acceptance period, during which we can get our money back if the software isn't right for us?

We approach this issue in a different way: we make a fully-functional version of the software available for you to evaluate. In general, evaluation licenses are good for 45 days, but we'll be happy to discuss extending that period if there's a reason you need us to. Given this liberal evaluation policy, you should buy Perforce only after you've determined that it meets your needs.

Question 24: How about a confidentiality section? Here's the one we always use.

In general, we don't want your confidential information and we won't tell you ours. If you're concerned that you might need to divulge confidential information to our support team in order to get problems solved, we have a standard non-disclosure agreement, or we'd be happy to review yours if you have one. However, since we like to keep our EULA standardized, we'd prefer to do it as a separate agreement, rather than incorporating it into the EULA itself.

Question 25: What's this about "Perforce shall retain the copyright to all enhancements to the Software"? Does that mean that if I write a script that uses Perforce client commands, Perforce owns it?

No, it doesn't mean that. Because the word "Software" is capitalized, it refers to the definition of that term in the "Definitions" section of the EULA. "Software" means the combination of the "Program" and the "Documentation," two more defined terms, and "Program" means only machine-readable object code. Since your script isn't an enhancement to machine-readable object code, it isn't an"enhancement to the Software," even if it might be considered an enhancement to the software.