TetGen Licensing FAQ
1) Q.: What are the licensing conditions for TetGen ?
TetGen is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of
the GNU
Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, either version 3 of the License (AGPLv3), or (at your
option) any later version. A copy of the AGPLv3 is
reproduced here. TetGen is
distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
2) Q.: Sorry, but under these conditions I will be unable to use
TetGen. My company is selling the software it produces and makes a
living from that. If we take the AGPL seriously, we would starve,
or we cannot use TetGen.
If the terms and conditions of the AGPL v.3. would prevent you
from using TetGen, please consider the option to obtain a
commercial license for a fee. These licenses are offered by the
Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS).
As a rule, licenses are provided "as-is", unlimited in time for a
one time fee. Please send corresponding requests to
tetgen@wias-berlin.de.
Please do not forget to include some description of your company
and the realm of its activities.
3).Q.: How much is a commercial license then ?
Price qoutes are provided upon request. Please do not hesitate to
contact tetgen@wias-berlin.de
for a qoute.
4) Q.: Which support do you give ? How can we be sure that bugs are
fixed immediately ?
WIAS as a research institute has no infrastructure to provide 24/7
support, therefore both open source and commercial licenses do not
cover support. That said, nevertheless effort is made to keep the
reputation of TetGen high and to fix bugs within reasonable time.
For customers buying a commercial license, special arrangements
can be made which include testing of TetGen on a specfied limited
number of inputs.
Please be aware of the fact that mesh generation is an active
research field, and that some shortcomings of TetGen may be due to
the fact that for you particular case, the right algorithm has not
yet been found.
On the other hand, please consider that due to the Open Source
licensing policy there is a huge number of TetGen use cases and
that the feedback from these users already helped to make it more
stable.
5) Q.: How much, if any, informal support can one realistically
expect beyond bug fixes? Is it possible to make reasonable
requests for feature enhancements?
TetGen is the result of a research project in mesh generation for
numerical calculations. As such it has its own agenda for future
improvements. The main field of interest are anisotropic meshes
which are able to resolve interior and boundary layers in an
optimal way. This is however a hard topic, and it is not possible
to give any estimate concerning a first release with such
features.
Correspondingly, the resources to implement "features on demand"
are limited. If a feature requested by a number of users can be
implemented within reasonable time, there is a chance that such
suggestions are followed.
There is also the option of a paid development contract which
would allow to re-finance at least a part of the specific
development costs.
6) Is your commitment to maintaining and developing TetGen limited
to a known time horizon ?
Not for the forseeable future. As long as the mesh generation group at
WIAS has sufficient scientific output and regular financial input from
research contracts, licensing and research funding, the project will
have a good chance to be continued.
(We thank Ch. Barghiel from sidefx for asking questions 5 and 6).