what are acceptable licensing terms?

Posted by dan7000
May 18, 2009 at 05:00 PM

To echo Steve’s sentiment: The single-computer license is the worst. However, it’s also the easiest to enforce. If they provide an easy way to transfer licenses, I can sometimes deal with it. My license to Taskline has followed me through 3 computers now and it’s still going strong.

Some of you know I used to manage software development at Intuit. For a while, I was on a team attempting to design new DRM-based licensing schemes for the company’s software. I always have thought that service-based pricing, tied to free software, is the best scheme. For instance, we designed the scheme in TurboTax wherein you get a free copy of the software, but it costs money to either print or e-file your final return. I thought that was a really elegant, and 100% enforceable, way to charge people for software. Unfortunately, when it came out, users were pissed off and it got lots of bad press. I think that the furor has died down, though, and I believe that TurboTax still uses that model, at least for some set of its distribution.

User-based pricing is also a great model. Unfortunately, it’s hard to implement any enforcement scheme that isn’t prone to error. People get very upset when they buy software and then get locked out of it. This is one reason that web service tie-ins are so great: they let you do user-based software pricing. I.e., EverNote, etc. (They also let you charge per year instead of per release, which some users dislike).