Shareware vs demo/free version
Currently, our main software products are distributed on a "try and buy" base. The product you can download for free is the very same product you get when you buy it. Actually, it is the same set of files: only entering a special key they are turned into a full licensed product. The only difference between the "try and buy" and the "registered" version is that the first is time-limited: after 30 days it will expire. This is the way most shareware products work.
But there is a strong counter-indication. If you publish a software package without functional limitations, you are subject to piracy. It is somewhat easy to find a right key generator for every remarkable shareware product on the market, if you just look for pirate sites and you are brave enough to run the risk of downloading a piece of software that may contain all sort of viruses and malware. Nonetheless, a lot of people downloads the free "try and buy" version and after a while register it using piracy tools. I will not talk about the side effects of this behaviour, they are clearly visible.
To face the piracy, more and more software companies decided not to release "time-limited but fully functional" versions of their product. Instead, they release a functions-limited version, and they call it "Demo version". If you want to use the unlimited product, you buy it so that you can download it from a secure site. This is what normally happens with videogames. Not only doing this you can deliver the full product only to people who actually buy it, but you can save all efforts to make your software stand against piracy attacks (source code obfuscation, random key correctness checks and so on).
The main disadvantage against the "Demo version" policy, is that you can never show to your potential customer the real capabilities of your software. Persons that use the Demo version could be unsatisfied with it, but satisfied by the real product: too bad they will never see it! Of course you can advertise a strong "money back guarantee" so that the user can buy the full product and then decide that it does not fulfill his expectations.
After some thoughts about it, we decided to go for the "try and buy" option and to face the piracy threat. We want to be very transparent with our potential customers, showing to them our products as they truly are.
To tell the truth, we are not so angry with the people who prefer to use our software with keys coming from piracy. After all, they like our product and they use it (and this is the reason we write software, after all). To them we only say that without directly supporting the creation and maintenance of software, this is likely to disappear. That is, software written by small, independent software houses will disappear.
Then there is all the reasoning about Open Source software, but that will be covered in another post.
Anyway, ours is not a dogma, after all. Comments (even by software developers) are very welcome.
But there is a strong counter-indication. If you publish a software package without functional limitations, you are subject to piracy. It is somewhat easy to find a right key generator for every remarkable shareware product on the market, if you just look for pirate sites and you are brave enough to run the risk of downloading a piece of software that may contain all sort of viruses and malware. Nonetheless, a lot of people downloads the free "try and buy" version and after a while register it using piracy tools. I will not talk about the side effects of this behaviour, they are clearly visible.
To face the piracy, more and more software companies decided not to release "time-limited but fully functional" versions of their product. Instead, they release a functions-limited version, and they call it "Demo version". If you want to use the unlimited product, you buy it so that you can download it from a secure site. This is what normally happens with videogames. Not only doing this you can deliver the full product only to people who actually buy it, but you can save all efforts to make your software stand against piracy attacks (source code obfuscation, random key correctness checks and so on).
The main disadvantage against the "Demo version" policy, is that you can never show to your potential customer the real capabilities of your software. Persons that use the Demo version could be unsatisfied with it, but satisfied by the real product: too bad they will never see it! Of course you can advertise a strong "money back guarantee" so that the user can buy the full product and then decide that it does not fulfill his expectations.
After some thoughts about it, we decided to go for the "try and buy" option and to face the piracy threat. We want to be very transparent with our potential customers, showing to them our products as they truly are.
To tell the truth, we are not so angry with the people who prefer to use our software with keys coming from piracy. After all, they like our product and they use it (and this is the reason we write software, after all). To them we only say that without directly supporting the creation and maintenance of software, this is likely to disappear. That is, software written by small, independent software houses will disappear.
Then there is all the reasoning about Open Source software, but that will be covered in another post.
Anyway, ours is not a dogma, after all. Comments (even by software developers) are very welcome.
posted by Home Page at
9:47 AM
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