what are acceptable licensing terms?

Posted by moritz
May 18, 2009 at 05:47 AM

thanks Pierre, your perspective as a software developer is much appreciated!
Also reassuring for me that your licensing terms are not as prohibitive as I had thought (I recall having seen a mention of a “90 day transition period before you have to pay for full commercial license”?).
If you can clarify that your only restriction is “single user” then you can expect my order shortly!

Interestingly some of the examples above are great tools (MindManager, iMindMap) that either have always been super restrictive (and with a broken copy protection technology!) like iMindManager or recently increased their “protection” through additional activation measures.
Years ago I was about to buy MindGenius rather than MindManager 2002 (current version at that time) and although I liked MindGenius better, the “single PC” licensing killed it for me. Subsequently I have purchased every single MindManager update (5,6,7,8) and I know that 1000s of copies of MindManager have been purchased by companies based on my recommendation, so I am wondering if MindGenius have benefitted in the long run from their more restrictive licensing (which they are entitled to, just trying to point out that in an age where more people have 1 PC at work, 1 at home + likely one notebook or netbook the 3x price increase is likely to become a sales blocker more often than not).

So why did I post this? I feel that we have a voice as a community to give software developers a chance to rethink the way they want to interact with our group of compulsive buyers :-)