what are acceptable licensing terms?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jun 30, 2009 at 06:41 PM

Dan,

You philosophy as a developer seems to me very sensible. My sense, and I could be wrong, is that people who cheat on licensing were never going to be paying customers anyway. That is, you’re not actually losing money when they cheat, because they were never going to pay even if you’d made the license more restrictive. That may be small consolation for those people who do cheat.

But perhaps in a small way, those of us with CRIMP make up for them because we buy so much more software than we ever could possibly use!

Steve Z.

Dan Chartrand wrote:
>I’m a developer that has struggled with this question myself. How to keep paying
>customers from feeling the license terms are too restrictive, while still making
>enough income on purchased licenses to continue development.
> >When I first started
>selling VueMinder Calendar, I went with the “easiest to enforce” approach, which was
>1 license per computer. However, I felt this was too restrictive, and seemed to be
>hurting sales rather than helping, so I switched to a more lenient policy of allowing a
>single user to install the same license (for their own personal use) on up to 5
>computers. After making the switch, I saw new orders increase by about 30%.
> >Now,
>could someone install on 6 computers instead of the 5 specified in the license terms?
>Yes, and I wouldn’t know about it and don’t really have any way to enforce them not to
>(I’m not using DRM or any other invasive techniques). But honestly, I’d much rather
>someone pay for a personal license and install on their 6 computers (even if the limit
>is 5), than someone think the terms are too restrictive and resort to using a keygen or
>cracked version.