Fair trade? You're thinking like a vendor :) It's been shown time and
time again (at least in the Windows "shareware" world) that all
call-home does is upset your most loyal, paying customers, while getting
absolutely nothing from the folks who have no intention of ever paying a
cent for the use of the program.
Wendell Lovewell wrote:
I work for a vendor, so I understand the necessity of making sure that licensed products are used properly. But I also understand the inconvenience for both the customer and the vendor of managing software keys.
I’m wondering what the list’s response would be toward implementing a system that automatically managed the keys by allowing the software to “phone home” to update them. My thoughts are that each time the software was started, and perhaps periodically, it would report its own key (to identify the customer), CPU id, MSU and/or whatever licensing metric was used. If a verification response could not be obtained, either because of license expiration or communication errors, a grace period of “n” days would be allowed.
There would obviously be encryption, high availability, and possibly even customer firewall considerations. But it seems like a fair trade to me. Opinions?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
