why no commercial developer license

[Daisy Lassie]

hi sean,

i am an app developer on android. when i look around the internet your product is the best free solution, but it seems it's difficult to integrate without the app from the appstore.

now my question is: isn't it possible to give commercial licenses for about 200-300 dollars and therefore it would be easier to integrate in our products?

thx for reading, daisy

[Sean Owen]

I think the provided integration is extremely easy -- by Intent. 

The core scanning library is also extremely easy to integrate; it's just a stand-alone library.

What people sometimes want is a drop-in Activity or something to call. That's not unreasonable, but it's virtually the same experience as calling by Intent.

Some people say they don't want to use a third-party app on the device, usually because they're being paid to build a solution that has this requirement at minimum cost. People who are developing commercial apps with their own better UI don't have this problem, since they don't want to copy the existing UI anyway.

Providing a clone of the UI also means people will start to write in to the OSS project for support since they think they are using BS, and the OSS project isn't for commercial support.

So yes it would only make sense to put in work to support this if people were paying for it, I agree. That's also not unreasonable. I think the license would reasonably be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars depending on volume, putting it out of the range of most contractors being paid to do this cheaply anyway, who would just go copy the source code anyway, license problem or no.

The problem is also: who would get that money? This is the work of lots of people.

So, it's complicated, but my take is that the OSS project solves this problem well for everyone except some contractors, and I don't think the incentives make it reasonable to get the OSS project to do their work even for pay.

[Muhammad Babar]

Hi Sean,
I still didn't get the point! You said "The core scanning library is also extremely easy to integrate; it's just a stand-alone library."Do you mean we have to write own implementation on top of the library to do the camera scan stuff?

Also is installing the Barcode Scanner only option to use zxing right now? I mean there should be some activity part of the library and so that we can start the bar code scanner directly from our app rather than asking user to download the app from store?

Waiting for your kind reply.
Best

[Sean Owen]

You may integrate by Intent; this requires no license. You can reuse the core library under the terms of the OSS license, which is about as easy as I can imagine -- just declare it a dependency of your app in your build. You can reuse parts of the Android app even, just nothing that would so completely copy it as to possibly violate trademarks.

Can you push a button and have your own app? no.