TightVNC Licensing

The Default Option: GNU GPL

TightVNC is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (usually referred to as GPL). This is the primary type of licensing, you do not have to pay for it or enter into any special agreement. Just download the software and use it for any legally allowed purposes, including commercial use. Also, you may redistribute verbatim copies of the software with no limitations (unless such distribution is restricted by local or international laws). You even may modify the software and distribute its modified copies, provided that all your modifications are GPL-licensed as well.

GPL Restrictions

While GPL is usually a good option for end users of the software, it may not be that good for commercial software developers. GPL does not allow you to link GPL-licensed components with your proprietary software (without publishing it under the GPL as well). Also, it does not allow you to modify the GPL code and make the changes proprietary. Thus, you cannot use GPL code in your non-GPL projects (unless the GPL code is properly separated).

Alternate Licensing Options

To solve the described problems, we offer alternate business-friendly licensing options for certain parts of TightVNC. If you wish to integrate TightVNC into your commercial software package and GPL is not an acceptable option, you should obtain a commercial license. We can re-license only those parts of the software for which we own the complete copyrights. Currently, we sell licenses for the following components:

1. Complete TightVNC Server 2.0
2. Decoder for Tight encoding (written in pure C, easy to integrate into any RFB client)

Please contact us to get more information on licensing:

• business@tightvnc.com