I've had a few game concepts bouncing around in my head for the past year to year and a half, and having not lost any interest in them, I've decided to start taking steps towards seeing them through. While I don't have a team (most of my friends would find my ideas "stupid" because they don't fit their particular tastes in games), and I don't have a document written up for any of the concepts, I wanted to sort through different engines to get a feel for what I was going to get myself into. Most for-cost engines that I have run into have a very cursory license description on their website. For most things, I just email them directly to ask my questions, but then there's other stuff that I don't quite clearly understand and would feel stupid asking about. Like for example, when an engine says its license is for "per project or per seat" what does that mean precisely? I understand 'per project', but that "OR per seat" confuses me. What is a seat, and how is that distinctly different from the meaning behind 'per project'? I'm not interested in getting a lawyer into this; I'm just a student that's browsing for the moment. So, is there a reference source out there that I can use to describe different legal terminologies like this to me without having to ask the developers directly?

Per seat would also mean per computer. So if the license was 'per seat' and you had three programmers then you would need to buy three licenses. Depending on how things are setup your artists might also need seats.

> "OR per seat"

You can translate this to 'active user'. It means the license is not necessarily tied to a computer or account, but rather to someone actively using the software, regardless where it is used within the organization and on which computer, and that once that someone ceases using the software then that license becomes available for someone else. The licensing scheme works without requiring uninstalling the software from the inactive user.

Just to backtrack a bit, you should know there exists 'floating license' schemes (such as FlexNet). It allows anyone within a company to install the software on any computer, but such software will only run if it can successfully grab a license from a license server for which a limited number of license are available. It allows the licensee to manage the costs of using the software during the ups and downs of normal usage. For example, a company can decide to buy 30 licenses for some peak period and then drop 25 of those license when the demand for using the licensed software is lower.

Another known method is through 'dongles', hardware you physically have to attach to your computer for the software to work. The dongles represent 'one seat' and is easily transferable from one computer to another.

I've been told by someone in the licensing tech field that the term "per-seat" originates from the CAD-intensive engineering domain where CAD systems (ex: Dassault's CATIA) were mainly used to design vehicles (cars, airplanes, etc) and for which the term "per seat" was a known quantifier.

-cb

Basically what CB said, also see the Wikipedia article describing it.

The actual definition will be included in your agreement with them. They may mean floating licenses, or they may mean named users, or they may mean some other similar thing. Contact them for details.