Licensing of WinCC OA is covered by the central contract between CERN and ETM, allowing to use the product for

• production systems at CERN, for the Experiments, Accelerators, Technical Infrastructure and other permitted domains
• development and test systems at CERN
• development and test systems in the Research Instituted affiliated with CERN Experiments, who signed a sub-license agreement

Prerequisites

• To be able to request WinCC OA licenses you need to become a Registered WinCC OA User first; your institute may need to sign a sub-license agreement first
• You need to run one of the supported WinCC OA versions (currently 3.19 and 3.21).
  For older versions of WinCC OA, such as 3.16, not anymore supported at CERN, it is still possible to arrange for a license in exceptional, well justified cases. Contact the support line for details.
• To activate a license for WinCC OA 3.19 in a local machine (see below) you need to have patch P021.1 or higher installed (see the downloads page of WinCC OA 3.19)

Sublicense agreement

The use of WinCC OA by the users of research institutes affiliated with CERN through a collaboration agreement is possible after having signed a sub-license agreement. Please, follow the instructions for electronic signature strictly.

WinCC OA licensing methods

Currently supported WinCC OA versions (3.19, 3.21) use a license management system called CodeMeter.

For licensed use of WinCC OA you may:

• Development License Server
  if you develop with WinCC OA on CERN premises - provides an "instant" and effortless access for typical development tasks
• Activate the license on your machine (license container)
  if you need to use WinCC OA out of CERN campus network, in particular in the research institutes that sign the sublicense agreement.

License types and validity

Developer licenses

Developer licenses may be granted to all authorized and registered WinCC OA users. Their use is strictly limited to the development of control systems for CERN.

The validity of all development licenses is limited and may be extended every year, for the period of subsequent 12 months, assuming that the user is still eligible for the use of WinCC OA through CERN.
The list of licenses (containers) that should remain valid (and their validity extended) must to be explicitly communicated to the WinCC OA Service by the Technial Contact upon notification in Spring of every year,
otherwise the licenses will expire. The semi-automated mechanism for license updates replaces the need to obtain a new license every year. Please, refer to Updating the WinCC OA licenses chapter for more details.

Developer licenses have the limitation for the uninterrupted running of a single project to be maximum 365 days.

Production Licenses

Production licenses are granted exclusively for production systems on CERN premises, upon request from the Central DCS Teams, and often deployed using dedicated license servers. They may also be pre-installed in the systems managed by the SCADA Application Service.

They have indefinite license validity/updateability and do not need to be extended/updated, unless new licensing options should be activated.  However, when a machine on which they are deployed should be reinstalled, or the  project moved no another machine, the rehosting procedure must be followed, otherwise the license may be lost (a process that may be recovered).

Related topics

• WinCC OA Service Register User
• Sublicense Agreement
• Updating the WinCC OA licenses

Further information and documentation

Detailed description of licensing and CodeMeter are provided in the WinCC OA online documentation. 

Additional information may also be found at the JCOP FWWG presentations 

• JCOP FWWG 4 April 2023 
• JCOP FWWG 15 December 2020
• JCOP FWWG 5 September 2023

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