In the licence is this clause:

“Commercial Service Offerings” means services in which the Software is a part and for which the Licensee charges fees or has other income (such as but not limited to income from advertising, sale of consumables, or sale of books) related to documents generated by the Software.

To me that means I can't use it for anything where we are making money from the PDF's themselves.

I just wanted to check that usage that would be allowed and not considered commercial service offering would be:

-Sending a PDF to 3rd parties which contains a business report (such as how many widgets we sold this week).

-Sending a PDF to 3rd parties of a invoice/receipt for selling widgets.

You will need a CSO license for your use cases. The key phrase in the EULA is that you have "other income" from the generated documents. From our FAQ:



We are happy to make you an offer for a CSO license. Typically, a CSO license allows you to run Prince on any number of servers, serving one domain name, for an annual fee which includes upgrades and support.

To get a quote, please use our contact form or send an email to support@princexml.com

I think the reason it is confusing is this part of the FAQ:

"Commercial Use means that Prince can be used to prepare commercial documents, such as invoices, receipts and newsletters. However, it does not include Commercial Services."

So in what situation can you make a receipt, but it wouldn't be commercial service?

You are right that the text in the popup window has been misleading. It's a remnant from the pre-CSO days. Thanks for alerting us, it has now been removed.

The CSO license is in line with an industry-wide shift towards subscription-based licensing and load-balanced server farms.

Edited 12 Mar 2021 by howcome

Thanks this makes sense. We do currently have 'internal use only' for all server licence PDFs generated. If we add PDF's to send to 3rd parties we will get CSO.

One last question is: If we were to use a 3rd party for printing services (they would receive PDF digitally, and send us back the physical print outs to use internally) would that be OK with server licence?

Obviously would need a CSO licence if the printouts and/or PDFs were going to end up external.

As long as the documents are for internal use, you may use the Prince Server License.