Licensing of Lightburn for Personal Use

I’m interested in having my own license of Lightburn to do design work at home and spend more time at DMS working through settings. To do this properly, we need the Pro license to support the Thunder lasers which without a DMS discount is $199 per year plus $30 per year ongoing maintenance.

But in reaching out to Lightburn directly, their comment was that this is a 3-seat license. It can be installed on three separate machines - so I’m wondering out loud (or actually in Talk), if any 2 people would be interested in splitting / sharing the license. That comes to basically $66 per license (I’ll eat the $0.33). If you’re interested, let me know. @swa or anyone else if you think this doesn’t play well with the licensing Ts and Cs, let me know and I will cease and desist, but the company did make the comment to me - so I’d say sharing a license is valid.

At a glance their license agreement is surprisingly nonspecific on how seats are allocated, however I suspect the full terms on the click wrap license agreement will be more detailed - likely including the usual and customary restrictions on usage such as residents of a single household or limited to devices under the exclusive use of a single individual.

Would be my thoughts as well. It was their support that recommended either buying an extra seat through DMS (which we don’t do) or mentioning the 3 seat license. The best it says is I cannot sell the license to someone else (as in the whole license), but there is nothing stating anywhere about having seats in the same residence, etc. It just has to be MY license - which I can install on any three computers. So I would assume, I would be the person actually liable.

Alan, as a seasoned pro, you know better than this. :slight_smile: Why not purchase the non-DSP version, then do your design, then switch output devices before cutting.

Trust me - I wouldn’t have even gone there if it wasn’t suggested to me by Lightburn Support. - I mentioned I was a member of a consortium that had licenses and printers. Their comment was to reach out to the owner of the license and either “see if they have a spare seat you can use” or have that person “add a seat (much less expensive) that you can use”. Adding a seat is only $50. No comment about being in my family, in my company, anything. They did make it appear that if I want to properly prepare the layer values/settings - I could only do that if I had the Pro license. So we’ll see.

Interestingly, this is not the case in Europe. There, you are free to transfer/sell your license to anyone, notwithstanding license terms to the contrary (i.e., it’s the law).

We have special licenses provided by the owner that the support staff aren’t aware of. Why not get with several people and pursue your idea if legal?

@LightBurn sometimes floats around

Key sharing is explicitly called out in our license terms:

The intent is that if you are a business, you can purchase multiple “seats” to install on however many computers you use for your staff. If you are a person who wants to use LightBurn, you buy a key.

DMS has a discount code available for people who want to use the software at home but don’t have their own hardware. If you do have your own machine, you purchase a key at the normal price.

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Unless I’m mistaken, I believe that the discount code has expired. Would it be possible to get that renewed?

Yes - we were under the impression the discount has expired. If we can get that renewed - that’s what we were looking for and what prompted the discussion.