[Lancelot] Something to watch out for...

David Brown david at westcontrol.com
Thu Sep 23 10:11:09 PDT 2004


> > Actually, from looking at it it says "one year *license*" and no updates
> > at all.  That might mean it dies after a year.  Would be bad.
>
> I called them and they said "Yes, it dies after a year", that is, not just
> updates.  So that is bad (unless we can magically stop time ;-).
>

As far as I understand it (I'm just a customer, but I've talked to my
distributer about this), the licensing works as follows when you buy a Nios
development kit:

You get 1 year subscription to Nios (i.e., all upgrades).  You have a
perpetual license for the Nios (i.e., you can use it for ever).  So after a
year, you can't upgrade it (except perhaps for service packs?), but you can
still use it.

You get 1 year subscription to full Quartus, with a 1 year limited license.
After that year is up, you cannot use full Quartus anymore.  You are free to
use the web edition as normal, along with your Nios license.

Normally, if you buy a full Quartus license, it works like the Nios license
above.  The 1 year limited license is a special arrangement for the Nios
kits.  And for many users, the web edition will be perfectly sufficient -
steadily more "full" functionality gets moved to the web edition - for me,
the only problem with the web edition is that it doesn't support Stratix
(except the small ones).  Considering the price of a full licence is not
much more than that of one of the big Stratix chips, it's not a huge
problem.

I believe (though I'm not sure) that you can convert your 1 year full
Quartus license to a normal perpetual Quartus license by simply paying the
subscription renewal for it at the end of the year - in other words, if you
intend to subscribe to updates you can pretend that it is a normal full
license.

David




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