Which License?

[Daniel Freeman]

(Sorry - noob question).

To evaluate or deploy PlayScript on iOS and Android, which Xamarin License would I require?

Will I require Indie Licenses, at least? (one for each platform)? = $598

Free Starter Licenses are restricted from using third-party libraries - So I assume that won't do?

See: https://store.xamarin.com/

[Kevin Newman]

I'm a little unclear on how the Xamarin license works too. From what I understand, you don't actually need a license from Xamarin to use Mono. Somewhere in there is why you don't need a Xamarin license to use Unity 3D, which is also based on Mono.

I think the Xamarin license applies to just a few things - the IDE - Xamarin Studio, and some of their mobile libraries (though I think they recently made those available under and open source licensing). I once read somewhere that you needed a license from Xamarin to use Mono in a non LGPL compatible way, like building statically linked binaries for iOS - but I'm not sure how accurate that is.

The Starter Licenses from Xamarin are kind of like a bad joke - they should really get rid of it, because it comes off as kind of a scam.

Anyway, I'd love a detailed explanation if anyone has it. :-)

Kevin N.

[Ben Cooley]

We did not need a license until we started using the mobile (Xamarin iOS and Xamarin Android) libraries and IDE support.  MacOSX still works perfecty fine without a license (though that may change) and of course Windows support does not need a license.

For us, the Android and iOS professional platform support and access to the complete API's for iOS 7 and Android latest is extremely valuable, worth the licensing cost.  This gives us a common platform that is well maintained that we don't have to worry about.  PlayScript gives us a common language for web and mobile apps that allows us to use lots of unsafe/native C# code on mobile to ensure the highest possible performance.  It's a win/win/win - full unified platform access with Xamarin, simple high performance cross web/mobile with PlayScript, and unsafe code where we need bare metal mobile device perf.