GreenSock

The “No Charge” license that comes with most of the GreenSock classes is perfectly sufficient for most projects, but corporate Club GreenSock memberships come with a different license that allows use in commercial applications/web sites/components. How do you know whether or not you need the commercial license? Here are some guidelines:

The basic rule of thumb is if end users are not charged a usage/access/license fee for your product, you do not need the commercial license that comes with a corporate Club GreenSock membership. If your client hires you to create a product/site for which they will charge usage/access/license fees, they would be the ones who would need to get a corporate Club GreenSock membership.

Why Invest in a Corporate Club GreenSock Membership?

• Performance – The GreenSock tweening platform (TweenLite/FilterLite/Max) outperforms most (if not all) other full-featured engines out there, often by a wide margin. See for yourself at http://blog.greensock.com/tweening-speed-test/. Or create your own benchmarks. This is probably the single biggest reason most developers switch to the GreenSock tweening platform. You want your applications to be extremely responsive, not sluggish. What is that worth?
• Money & Time - Hundreds of hours have been spent creating, optimizing, enhancing, testing, documenting, and troubleshooting the tweening classes. If your development team tries creating their own, they’ll very likely run into many of the same challenges along the way and have to figure out ways around them. I can save you the time and hassle. You also need to factor in the cost of maintaining the code, documenting it, and adding features over time and/or porting them to the next version of ActionScript, etc. Found a bug? Send it my way and I’ll do my best to squash it while your team is focused on other issues. With all the time savings, you can get your product to market faster.
• Engineering – The GreenSock tweening platform has been built in a way that makes it easy to plug in just what you need for your project instead of taking a “cram everything into one class” approach. TweenLite is only about 3k and is perfect for 90%+ of the tweening challenges you’ll face. But if you need additional features, you can step up to TweenFilterLite or TweenMax for just those tweens. TweenGroup makes it easy to manage groups and sequences of tweens. OverwriteManager can be used to have fine-tuned control over how and when tweens of the same object handle overlaps. And all the GreenSock tweening classes are built in AS2 and AS3 for your convenience. Most other tweening engines only come in AS2 or AS3 flavors, not both.
• Popularity – Because TweenLite/FilterLite/Max are so popular in the Flash community, members of your development team are probably already familiar with it, so time isn’t wasted learning a new syntax or API. Even if they’re not familiar with it yet, there are lots of tools on the site to make learning easy. One of my priorities has been to make the code simple to use. You also benefit from the community’s involvement - with so many people using the code, any bugs or inconsistencies quickly bubble to the surface. Some fantastic suggestions come from the wealth of knowledge out there too.
• Business-friendly - Many open source licenses require that if you use their code in your application, you must share your entire application’s source code with the community as well. Yikes! That’s not the case with GreenSock licenses.
• Extras like bonus classes - Your corporate Club GreenSock membership gets you access to useful classes like TransformMatrixProxy, CustomEase, ColorTransformProxy, and for multi-developer memberships, LiquidStage. You also get access to the SVN repository for the main tweening classes, and update notifications.

How Much Does It Cost?

There are 4 different levels based on the number of developers that will have access to the code, all of which come with a license to use the GreenSock tweening platform and the bonus classes in commercial software. Please see the Club GreenSock page for pricing and details.

How Do I Get a License?

Just sign up for a corporate Club GreenSock membership at the level that corresponds to the number of developers in your organization. That’s it!

Why Not Give the Code Away for Free?

There are two primary reasons:

1. Your financial support keeps the project going - We’ve all seen open source projects that fizzle and die because the authors got busy with other stuff and couldn’t cash-flow the project. I’ve learned the hard way that it takes a LOT to create, document, distribute, enhance, and support code. My hope is that the income generated by licensing fees and donations will help guard against the common frailties of open source projects and in the end provide a better service to developers and the community at large.
2. It only seems fair - The only developers who need to get a corporate membership are the ones who charge their end users a licensing fee. They recognize that it takes a lot of time to develop code (and to a larger degree the ideas behind the code) and end users should legitimately pay for the value it provides.