Certainly controls around software use are needed. Intellectual property must be protected. May be I phrased it or categorized it wrong for lack of better words but in all spirits I completely agree with you.

You are right, we are seeing “Try Before You Buy” with many applications now. Starting from big players like Camtasia to Sony Vegas suite of applications. Most IM software creators even to this day don’t know or are unwilling to invest into a clean software provisioning process keeping their prospects needs in perspective. Just today I downloaded an application for converting 1080i videos into FLV format called iskysoft. From a usage perspective its not effective as it uses watermark on the final videos forcing the prospect to pay for the license.

They need a few lessons from you I guess -

Srini

I don’t know if saying software licensing is a con (negative). I would argue the opposite in fact. But it can be seen as an annoyance to the end user, so as you say – as long as it’s easy for the end user to get their license renewed when needed then using software licensing works well.

The trouble with MOST of the old internet marketing software was that the developers (marketers) didn’t know how, or couldn’t be bothered to implement it. Sell it and forget it type of thinking. So the IM community got used to thinking that all IM software was done this way.

I insist on having trial versions of all my software. In order to do that you need to put licensing in it, to work out who’s paid and who’s just got a trial version, etc.

When I released version 1 of Script Smart a looonnnggggg time ago, hardly anyone was doing trial versions of IM software.

Now everyones doing it. WHY. Surprise. Surprise. Because try-before-you-buy actually works.

Aaron