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Licensing Software to Individual vs. Corporation?
"Microsoft has a nice licensing idea for colleges. They sell 'student' licenses for $5 for any MS product (I got VC++6 for $5). The stipulation was that I could not commercially sell anything I developed with the product. This was fine by me. It gave me the experience with VC++ so that I could go to an employer and tell them that I've used the product at home and am comfortable using it.
A big benefit for the publisher is that you get customers of the product right away, who are more likely to either buy it when they belong to a company or put in a word to switch to it from a competitors product. Why isn't this type of license used more often? I could see many open source projects would highly benefit from licensing like this, and the publishers advantage is that they could even use it as free marketing (a completely fictional example - KDE3, designed with Rational Rose, icons made by 3D Studios Max, testing done with JUnit and WinRunner).
So, are their any other licensing/selling schemes that would allow the individual to use the product, and the publisher still make a profit on corporate sales?"
No need for such licensing schemes here in Malaysia (yet).
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Excerpt from Malaysian copyright law:
http://www.kpdnhq.gov.my/ip/copyright.html
The Copyright in a work is infringed when a person who, not being the owner of the copyright,
and without licence from the owner, does or authorises any of the following acts:-
(some clauses omitted for clarity)
(vi) possesses, otherwise than for his private and domestic use, any infringing copy
(viii) imports into Malaysia, otherwise that for his private and domestic use any copy which if
it were made in Malaysia would be an infringing copy
---
So it seems if it's for private and domestic use it's ok.
I've worked and attended several colleges in two different countries (including the USA) and have never seen any of them offering Microsoft's software for $5. While some of them obtain licenses that allow students to use the software for free on their private PCs, this tends to be restricted to a small number of their products (usually just Office), most of them just tell you to buy the educational versions, which are in the $50-200 range.
Most corporations have student versions of their software available, but that still doesn't mean they're cheap. 3d Studio is a few grand to buy normally but is over $500 on a student license - still a rediculous price given how broke most students are.
I personally think Maya's way of doing it by having a slightly trimmed-down version available for free (as in beer) is a great way of introducing people to a new technology without sacrificing the company's IP or beggering students.
this is rather similar to a recent article on warez.
particularly this post, which mentions how Adobe allowed piracy to nullify the cheaper competition.
as to more moral licensing, I have always believed that the GPL can be modified to include clauses for corporate, educational, and governmental customers (all different pricing structures of course). this way the customers that can afford it must pay some small fee.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I like the licensing scheme in Maya. There's a downloadable learning edition which has all the basic functionality of the purchase version and a tonne of online docs. The difference between the two versions is that they can't read each other's files and the learning edition's rendering has a watermark embedded over top.
I personally think that Blender is a better solution for people on no budget, but if you really need to learn Maya at home the Personal Learning Edition is great. Other companies should follow suit with similiar programs.
- Cloud
Alias|Wavefront provides a free Personal Learning edition of their Maya product.
It has some limitations (e.g. source files not interchangeable with paid-for version, watermark on each image, no plug-ins, resolution limits), which would inhibit its use in a commercial environment but allows you and I to get valuable hands-on experience.
Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
Don't sell software. Period. Think about if for a minute. This reply is like a Calculus II problem. If you have moved on to the next post by now then you have missed the point (Hint: replace "Period." with "Sell dynamic signals."
You know the Microsoft destroys the night, Linux devides the day...
I feel that all software houses selling propretary software should allow several installs of their products. If I use a product at work (for example a word processor) and I want to use the same product at home, I do not see the problem. I would never pay $5k for an office suite, but rather use a free alternative or a pirated copy. This would be good for my employer too, since I would gain experience with the software that I'm supposed to use at work. I'd even stretch it to being good for the software house, as I have experience from their product I'd want it at my next work too.
On the other side, I do not see why a company making commersial use of a free alternative should be able to do so without giving back to the community.
As a good example of good licensing I would like to point out trolltech's licensing model (faq here)for Qt. I can play around with it and make GPL'ed software without any fees, but if I want to get some $$$ from selling the software I need to give them some $$$ first.
A big benefit for the publisher is that you get customers of the product right away, who are more likely to either buy it when they belong to a company or put in a word to switch to it from a competitors product. Why isn't this type of license used more often? I
:-)
This sort of licensing scheme is quite common, when I was a student I got MATLAB and CodeWarrior, in addition to MS Office under these terms. Unfortunately it did not result in more sales for those companies when I graduated, although if I'd gone into Engineering, it would have
Some other programs rely on hardware keys that plug into the parallel port of your computer. The nice thing about that is that you can install the software anywhere you want and you just need to carry the key around with you to use it whereever you want. The down side is that it is a pain sometimes carrying the key around (and if you lose it, you have to basically purchase the whole program again to get another one). On the whole I dislike hardware keys, but one place it makes it convenient is being able to install and run the program anywhere.
the license on software like WS_FTP or Sygate's firewalls is great. They have fully functional versions of their software available for free to home users that will continue working forever. But if a business user wants to use their software they have to shell out the cash. Keep in mind these aren't open source, but that really doesn't make a difference in this case. I really wish more software was like this.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I think it would be great if you could download commercial software, using it on a learning basis, and just have to provide your contact information. For example, if it's a compiler like Visual Studio, you can write code, etc, but any code you write must be released into the public domain if it leaves your computer. The understanding would be that if you were caught using the software for anything other than a learning basis, or make money off the product you are using for free, the software maker has the right to bill you for its product.
I should have picked out the nickname Demosthenes!Tecumseh.
For the most part the most functional software products have an extremely high cost to vlaue ratio...
The solutions that publishers have come up with for these issues are not true acceptable. The cripiled versions...missing features, and functions(what the hell is the point of playing with it if you can't save your work, that one really irks me)...or the differnt leveled versions, professional, enterprise, architect...big deal I can but the pro edition for $200, but then i get a book on the product and find out the functions, features, and components I want or only in architect for $1500.00...that doesn't help...
MAKE one version, charge a reasonable price for it...$49.95...then if I do anything truely useful with it charge a royality for having written and compiled my code, or drawn my picture, etc with it...say 2% of the net profit I got from using your product to make my product...as reprehensible as forced registration is this might be a reasonable place for it...the registration code for the product would be burned into the anything that comes out of the product allowing things to be traced back to the end user/corporation.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
QNX does this - free *nixy RTOS for non-commercial use.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Check out the free download> of Maya. You get Maya Complete, a $2,000 USD program (if you buy at their online store) for free, for certain (educational) uses, minus a few features (plugins, I think), and plus watermarks on your stuff - certainly enough to learn on though.
A very sane, very educated philosophy, if you ask me.
--Dan
My question is, what kind of selling schemes/licenses would work to allow the individual to learn and use the product, but still allow the publisher to make a profit from corporate sales?
Simple. Make everything illegal, and then selectively enforce against corporations, but not individuals. That's pretty much what companies do already, and it's why you're a sucker if you follow every license agreement to a T.
This is what Netscape did with Navigator for instance. They made it illegal to use the software after a 30-day trial period, knowing that individuals would ignore that restriction en masse, while corporations would be forced to pay up or face the BSA.
Well, I'm not sure if other companies have thought of this, but Oracle pretty much gives their software to developers. You have to register with them, but you get a development style license that pretty much lets you learn it. The download are the full product, not a limited version (I have the full 9i setup at home). If you want to use it for real then you have to pay for it. Basicly the developers who want to learn it can, without paying the mega $$$ to do so.
Too bad other companies don't feel the same way about developers.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
the truth is if GCC was supported and was a functional on windows as it is on Unix
MinGW, a port of GCC to Windows, can compile just about any non-MFC app that MS Visual C++ can.
The graphics race is a little harder, but gain if there were versions of gimp, imagemagick, and Blender that worked as well in windows as in Unix there might be more of a horse race there too...
Blender works on Windows. So does GIMP, at least at the level of Paint Shop Pro. So does ImageMagick. (However, last time I tried IM, it claimed to read XCF but could not read its alpha channels.) So does a free (LGPL) office suite.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Some vendors make their stuff free for non-commercial use. That is, you want to use to to learn, or for personal projects, fine. But if you use it as a business, or make money from it, you have to pay.
This is quite fair.