DevCert - commercial use

[heuven]

Hi,

1. Is (from a legal perspective) it allowed to use Developer Certificates for a commercial rollout of an application within a closed community (set of users)?

2. If no, is it possible to sign an agreement with Nokia which makes this possible?

Kind regards,

Rene

[antonypr]

What do you mean by distribute commercial application within a closed community? For testing only or really to sell it?

From my understanding, it is not legal to distribute developer certificate signed applications commercially. Here is a copy from SymbianSigned.com.

Developer Certificate signed applications must not be distributed commercially. If an application needs to be signed to access capabilities then you should go through Symbian Signed to distribute your application commercially.

Antony

[heuven]

Hi Antony,

Yes - I also have seen this part. One could also interpret it as: it is "best practise" to distribute your application as Symbian Signed. It is not recommended to distribute applications using Developer Certificates.

With "distributing an commercial application within a closed communicaty" I mean actually selling it commercially, but as the application does network measurements it wil be sold as a project. Thus beforehand it is exactly known how many users we have, which users we have, which phones are involved, etc. Also there might be changing requirements from the customer (network operator) and not pushing the application through the Symbian Signed program will allow us to handle updates much more flexible.

So my main question still stays:

1. Is it legal? Can someone from Nokia provide a clear statement on this? Who to contact at Nokia to get an official statement about this? This is useful as we are talking about a considerable amount of investment/money.

2. If no, can we enter an agreement with Nokia to make an exception for this case? Who to contact for that?

Regards,

Rene

[antonypr]

Also note that developer certificate has very short time validity (6 months/1 year?) How are you going to maintain the application after the developer certificate expires? Will your client come back to you and ask for new installer?

How about distributing your application in unsigned version? Basically, you have to ask your clients to apply for developer certificate and sign the application theirselves?

Unfortunately I don't have Nokia contacts regarding this issue either. I am not a legal expert either, so couldn't advise any further.

Antony

[antonypr]

Btw, you can try to ask Symbian forum discussion too, http://developer.symbian.com/forum/forum.jspa?forumID=2.

Antony

[heuven]

The application/project will run in a type of "managed service" mode. The software distribution platform will be installed on the customer site. They will indeed have to refresh the developer certificates once they have become invalid - maybe we can create a report generator to provide alerts which certificates will become invalid in the next week / month? Such that the customer can take appropriate action in time?

Thanks for the pointers - very helpful this discussion

BR,

Rene

[ptrmn]

I'd recommend you send an email directly to Symbian Signed and ask them. That way you'll get a definite answer, instead of speculations.

[acvwieringen]

Hi René,

we have been in the same situation and have asked Symbian Signed to use a dev cert for a number of IMEIs (more than hundred) to rollout an application to a closed user group.

This use was rejected on the grounds that the dev. cert. license only allows the use of dev. certs for testing purposes.

(By the way: an issue with a dev. cert. is that you can use the certificate for more than one application.)

Regards,

Andre van Wieringen
Excelbian
www.excelbian.com