With Stuffed Tracker we want to be as liberal with licenses as possible. We want to trust our customers and want to make a process of purchasing and installing a license of the product as easy as possible for them.
You might know that there is a widely used approach to selling a web software product, which roughly works like this:
A customer pays for the software and gets access to the protected area on the developer’s web site, where the latest full version of the software can be downloaded. Usually the access is given for a year and to continue downloading new versions of the software a customer should pay a special renewal price.
With this approach there is usually only a functionally-limited trial version of the product available as a free download. Sometimes even a trial version is not available and you can only use an online demo version with no way of trying the software on your own server.
With Stuffed Tracker we want to do something different:
- A fully functional trial version (limited to 30 days of usage) would be available for a free download by anyone. This will always be the latest version of the software. No registration required. No strings attached. Completely open source code. We trust you.
- When you purchase a license, you get a license code, similar to the one we all got used to with desktop software. You enter this code in your copy of Stuffed Tracker and it automatically goes out of trial mode and become registered.
- You can continue to download the latest versions of the software even after the year has passed since your license purchase date.
- Your license will work with all new versions with the same first number, but would require an upgrade for a new major version with a new first number. For example, if you’ve purchased a license for version 2.x, it will work for any future 2.x versions, but will require an upgrade for 3.x version. We feel this is a fair deal for our customers, especially if compared to “updates for a year” approach.
The only little requirement that we would impose with this licensing scheme is a special page accessible in any installation of the product. It would list the ids of the licenses already installed and will help us to verify that licenses are valid in case this would become necessary. The license would forbid to remove or alter this page.
