Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
- Subject: Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
- From: Richard Schreyer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 22:51:03 -0700
I've got some questions not about the technical side of licensing
shareware, but rather how to get users to pay...
So far, I've only written (fairly successful) freeware, because it
really doesn't obligate me to continue any work in the future, and I
like that freedom. But because the Software Engineering intern market
is so tight this year, I wasn't able to find any meaningful employment.
I've been doing Cocoa for a couple of years, but not many are hiring
interns for Cocoa programming ;) Of course, even finding a C/C++/Java
internship has been hard.
I really don't want to sit on my ass for a summer, and have been
considering putting together a project that I've been planning for some
time. The options for licensing are pretty much Freeware vs.
Shareware. Free is cool, since I can drop it if I want/need to,
shareware would be cool too, since Income is obviously a good thing. Us
college students need ramen money. Since this is going to be a small
cheap app, if it goes shareware I'm not really concerned stopping the
crackers, just casual users who may try to grab a serial number online.
There have been several articles written recently, (Ambrosia's in
particular comes to mind) about getting users to pay for Shareware,
which pretty much stated that their evidence says giving users a fully
functional version and asking them to pay eventually simply doesn't
work, even in the case of quality software. Personally, I despise
nagware, and it's always the first thing I throw away, so making the
user wait 10 seconds every time they start the app is out. Timeboms
suck too, since it often keeps users from trying out future versions of
your app, after they decided they didn't like a previous version (this
has bitten me personally several times too.)
The only real middleground is to have some advanced features disabled
(but nothing central to using the program, the quicker it becomes a part
of the way they use their mac, the better), with low-scale nagging.
Something along the lines of OmniWeb, although I think they went a
little light...
Can anyone provide any feedback on what kind of unregistered
limitations/nagging they found that worked well to encourage the user to
buy without pissing them off?
And for those of you out there who have released shareware in the $15-20
price range, anyone willing to share roughly how many copies they've
sold? I have absolutely *no* idea how large the market is right now.
I know it's a long post, but thanks for reading this far (:
Richard Schreyer
On Saturday, June 15, 2002, at 09:59 PM, Jeff LaMarche wrote:
Personally, I give away everything I write that's not work related
(i.e. anything
I write for the Mac) because I do it for fun and to grow as a developer
and
because I don't have the ability to take on any support obligations. I
just
released an open-source cocoa framework (well quasi-framework, I
haven't packaged
it as a framework yet) and application for generating barcodes that
provides
all the functionality of programs I've seen selling for hundreds of
dollars.
That's not a very effective strategy for those of you looking to pay
bills
and put food on the table from writing Mac software, though =).
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