GS wrote:

GS wrote:

No, developers of Excel-based solutions do not ship Excel with their
program; - users MUST have MS Office installed on their machine to
use Excel-based programs.

Part of the turnkey cost is the customer buying Excel. When a customer
buys device that employs a commercial OS, they don't care and probably
aren't aware that they are buying the OS license. There are tons of
cash registers using embedded Windows, but the grocery store or
corporate business office doesn't care that part of the cost was to get
a Windows license. They bought a product, not its parts.

OSes can be licensed to devices as OEM distributable; - Excel must be
purchased for personal use and/or volume licensed for corporate use.

That does not conclude, though, that MS Office comes with Windows. When an
Excel-based developer creates solutions, Excel is used to do that. By
attrition, users of that solution MUST have Excel installed on their
machines prior to using Excel-based solutions. Excel itself is NOT
distributable by said developer(s) and so machines that don't have Excel
can't use Excel-based solutions!

The rep comes to the customer, installs the software solution, and
leaves. Why can't the rep also install Excel? Anyone can buy licenses
to Excel, but who registers it becomes the license owner. The rep
simply registers the Excel he installed to the customer that paid him.
Hell, I can buy a copy of Excel with its candidate license, and install
it on a friend's or family's computer for them to use, and I register it
as them being the licensee.

In the case cited here, I can see your point. What does downloaded software do
to install itself when a user doesn't want any part of MS Office installed?
That's why I bought my own spreadsheet controls; - to not be dependant on
Excel! (I think you're stretching things a bit here!)

While the example of cash register mentioned the OS, that's just the OS.
Some POS software must also get installed for that cash registry to do
its job. I've not gotten into POS (Point Of Sale) software to know what
is its typical licensing model.

Such things as cash registers and the like (POS devices) usually have their own
proprietary software pre-installed which is typically not Windows (or even
Linux). I have written POS apps that run under Windows on PCs, some tied to
accounting software either 3rd party or included in my app. Any Excel-based
versions are also available as stand-alone EXEs for users that don't use MS
Office.

--
Garry

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