Craig and all,


>>I am about to make the jump into Crystal Reports. Just to be clear: the designer edition allows you to distibute reports and runtime (not design) files with no additional license fees, correct?

>It depends. If your application runs on a server or produces reports on a regular schedule for distribution, then you need additional licenses. Also, if you programmatically modify the report, then you'll need additional licenses. If all you do is produce canned reports from the workstation, you're ok.

A minor correction/addition: A report could be programmaticly modified if using the same API that was available from version 7 (maybe 8). Trough the RDC, you can move and format reports trough various properties and methods. Because Seagate could not change their policy toward CR 7 users who did use the RDC to format their report, you can still use those methods in CR 8 and up.

Another thing about the developer licence for distributing the runtime requirements. I looks like that you don't need any licence to distribute the CR 8.5 runtimes as they are avaliable as MSM from the www.installshield.com. I've asked seagate what the legal state was about using this MSM for your own distributions. Some support guy returned a mail he could not answer my question, but he'd ask some other authority to anwer my question. To date, i've not seen any further reply.

So it seems that it is perfectly legal to make your reports in the proffessional version and distribute them with the MSM provided by installshield.

Walter,