Cadsoft, you are making a mistake with the new version 7 license structure.
License security is a tradeoff between loosing revenue to dirtbags who are
willing to steal, versus making it too much of a hassle to the honest
customers so that they buy less of your product or abandon your product
altogether and go to a competitor. Your ver 7 license structure is too far
towards the latter, which will ultimately decrease your revenue. Here is a
proposal that strikes a much better balance, and is therefore better for
both you and your customers.
Allow a single-user license to be run on all machines used by the single
person the software is licensed to. However, you do more tracking than
before. To purchase a single-user license, the customer must supply the
complete name of the user the license is for, and the name and company
details when applicable. The user must "sign" a statement that only he
personally will use the software. This would not be a lengthy license
agreement that is easily forgotten or so long that nobody reads it. You
can still have one of those if you wish. This would be a separate screen
or something that says this concisely in plain language in sentence or
two.
The software itself is still node-locked, using the unique ID of the
processor or the like. However, the customer can go to your web site at
any time to generate a password for a particular machine. He has to
provide a key he was given with purchase so that you know who the customer
is. As part of the license generation process, the customer provides a
brief explanation of how this machine will be used, like "main work
computer", "my home computer", "my laptop", etc, where it is located, who
owns it, etc. If a machine is replaced, this is noted, like "replaces home
machine, which is no longer in use". The web site will always give you a
new node-locked license, but the user will know that you know how many
machines he is running the license on.
This will not prevent fraud, but does make it less likely because you still
know every computer the software is running on. Vandals and thieves don't
like people knowing what they are doing.
At worst you are going to get a group of people buying one license and
getting several copies by claiming they are on different machines used by
the same person. However, actually think about what that really costs you.
These are going to be cheap hobbyists that probably wouldn't use Eagle at
all otherwise. If they couldn't steal cheap licenses from you, they'd put
up with freeware instead, or use a cracked copy. These people wouldn't be
real paying customers anyway, so you are losing very little. However, even
this is still to your advantage because they are additional Eagle users out
there that may cause others to use it, and maybe some day will be in a
position to recommend ECAD software in a real commercial setting.
We have 3 ver 5 licenses here. The one I use is installed on three
separate machines, one here at work, one at home, and a laptop. These are
all "my" machines and I only ever run Eagle on one of them at a time. Of
course you have to trust me on that, but in return I'll keep upgrading my
license when new features I care about come out, and I'll keep recommending
Eagle to my customers. I know of at least 3 separate companies that have
bought Eagle because of my recommendation. I don't know how many more
companies have bought Eagle as a result of people from those companies
recommending it to others, but that could very well have happened a few
times.
Making things difficult for people like me is really not smart. I'm
certainly not going to whole-heartedly recommend Eagle anymore as it stands
now. I don't want to get my customers trapped into software with
excessively restrictive licensing because that will make me look bad when
they have the inevitable problems that causes. Also, I'm not so sure about
the future of Eagle anymore. This seems like the beginning of the end, and
I don't want to get my customers into something that is going to be a dead
end. Again, being penny-wise and pound-foolish like this is really not
smart.
I'm not going to run away soon, but I am going to start paying more
attention to alternatives. Previously I was a happy Eagle user and didn't
waste time seeing what else was out there. You have now changed that. You
have already damaged the realtionship and broken the feeling of mutual
trust. If you fix the version 7 license mess, it will take time for us to
get over the feeling of betrayal, but the situation is still recoverable.
However, the longer this continues the more you will alienate your
customers, which will eventually be irreversible.
--
Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca. Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.
