QuickOPC User's Guide and Reference
Licensing
QuickOPC is a licensed product. You must obtain a license to use it in development or production environment. The legal aspect of the QuickOPC licensing requires you to comply with the terms of its End User License Agreement (EULA). The technical aspect of the QuickOPC licensing requires that for both the development and runtime purposes, you install or or otherwise provide a license key file that you have obtained with the QuickOPC 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.
When you develop for .NET Framework, COM or Excel platform, the licenses 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 6+ platform, you can embed the license key in a managed resource directly in your program. For details, see Managed Resource License Store.
For evaluation purposes, you are granted a trial license, which is in effect if no other license is available. The QuickOPC.NET, QuickOPC-UA and QuickOPC-COM parts are licensed together.
With the trial license, the components only provide valid OPC data for 30 minutes since the application was started. After this period elapses, performing OPC 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 QuickOPC, 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.
QuickOPC includes 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 QuickOPC has been developed and is distributed by an OPC Foundation corporate member, GPL 2.0 does not apply to users of QuickOPC.
QuickOPC 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 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 QuickOPC, 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.
QuickOPC includes 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.