Connectivity Software User's Guide and Reference
Licensing
Members of the Connectivity Software family are licensed products. You must obtain a license to use the product in development or production environment. The legal aspect of the Connectivity Software licensing requires you to comply with the terms of its End User License Agreement (EULA). The technical aspect of the Connectivity Software licensing requires that for both the development and runtime purposes, you install or otherwise provide a license key file that you have obtained with the product purchase (unless you are evaluating the product, in which case the built-in trial license can be used).
The license key is in a file, typically with .BIN or .TXT extension.
On Windows, when you develop for .NET Framework, .NET 8+, COM or Excel platform, the license keys are installed and managed using a License Manager utility (GUI, or console-based LMConsole Utility (License Manager Console)), described further in this document.
When developing for .NET Framework or .NET 8+ platform, on any supported operating system, you can embed the license key in a managed resource directly in your program (for details, see Managed Resource License Store ), or place it on a disk (for details, see File License Store ).
For evaluation purposes, you are granted a trial license, which is in effect if no other license is available.
With the trial license, the components or products only provide valid data for 30 minutes since the application was started. After this period elapses, performing data operations will return an error. Restarting the application gives you additional 30 minutes, and so on. If you need to evaluate the product but the default trial license is not sufficient for your purposes, please contact the vendor or producer, describe your needs, and a special evaluation license may be provided to you.
When using Connectivity Software products, you also need to comply with Licenses for 3rd-party Material included with the product.
You can only distribute the contents listed under Redistributable Material with your product.
Connectivity Software products that support the OPC technology include code from OPC Foundation, such as OPC UA stack. Some of that code is released under dual-license model: RCL (Reciprocal Community License) applies to OPC Foundation corporate members, while GPL 2.0 applies to other users. Since Connectivity Software products have been developed and are distributed by an OPC Foundation corporate member, GPL 2.0 does not apply to users of Connectivity Software products.
QuickOPC, OPC Wizard and Rapid Toolkit for Sparkplug assemblies depend on (but do not include) various 3rd-party NuGet packages (mainly from Microsoft, and OPC Foundation; but there can be others, such as NewtonSoft). When you reference any of the QuickOPC, OPC Wizard or Rapid Toolkit for Sparkplug NuGet packages, you also need to consent to licensing conditions of the dependent packages (and their dependencies, recursively). As with the material directly included with Connectivity Software products, we have limited our choice of dependent packages to those with highly permissive licenses that will not limit you unnecessarily. It always remains your responsibility to review the precise license terms and comply with them.
Members of the Connectivity Software product family include some libraries licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or other licenses. They are only needed in special cases described in the documentation. You do not have to include them in your deployment unless you need to actually use the specific features they support. When you do not include them, LGPL does not apply.
For example, the PacketDotNet and SharpPcap libraries are only necessary if you want to use OPC UA PubSub Ethernet mapping, or work with Wireshark capture files.
Sparkplug is a trademark of Eclipse Foundation, Inc. "MQTT" is a trademark of the OASIS Open standards consortium. Other related terms are trademarks of their respective owners. Any use of these terms on this site is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply any sponsorship, endorsement or affiliation.