Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / April 2007

The article I quoted addresses this very situation.  Did you read it?

Again, the article I quoted suggests this, as well.  The problem was
that, for this particular company, they found that the number of people
who simply grabbed serial numbers off the web was much higher than they
anticipated.  As in, the opposite of their assumptions, which was that
people are by and large honest and will gladly cough up the $19 or
whatever.  This surprised them.

The received wisdom that the majority of your users will behave honestly
if you treat them a certain way was exactly what this particular person
found was not the case.  So, unfortunately, this assumption may not be
as true as we might like it to be.

It is true that we may not know for sure if people are abusing your
licensing, but this also means that there is little evidence that the
opposite is true, and the majority of your users are actually paying for
the software they use.

Yes, software companies continue to be in business.  Some have decided
to allow for volume sales, or higher per-unit prices, to cover the cost
of losses.  In the realm most of us live in, however, the margins can
get quite thin, and few smaller shops can afford that for very long.  In
this case a small developer company decided they couldn't continue to
bleed licenses if they wanted to keep their children in diapers and
shoes.  This, despite a very liberal sort of license accounting that
depended on, and assumed a basic honesty and diligence on the part of
most of their user base.

If the question is "are a majority of my user base using paid copies of
the software", then the answer is not very well known unless you collect
some empirical evidence (i.e., the license logs collected in the quoted
article).

Anyway, the reason I mention the article is to direct the OP at a modest
licensing scheme that attempts to find the balance between treating your
customers fairly, and ensuring you are actually getting paid for a
larger majority of those installs in use.

Yes, and that is why I quote the article.  It has a long introduction,
but ends up talking about a home-grown licensing technique that allowed
them to handle "license creep" while not treating their customers as
pirates.

All I'm talking about is a middle-ground here, folks.  I'm not saying
anything that hasn't been said elsewhere.

The fact is, there is a complex psychology going on here that makes
/some/ of us less diligent about /some/ of the software we use.

For some shops, the assumption that people are by and large honest about
this stuff was not borne out by the evidence.

Did revenues increase?  Who knows?  They did have a better understanding
of their users, and could be reasonable certain that the licenses they
saw being used were /paid/ licenses?  Yes, in fact they did.  Those
licenses representing money, and they could track them over time to come
up with all sorts of metrics.

The other side of this discussion is another assumption that people who
are willing to pay for your software may continue to support your
development.  Again, this is slightly true in my case (I find after a
reinstall or move to a new system I often forget to install that neat
piece of software I paid for because it is no longer all that
interesting to me) and something that Panic, Ambrosia, et al, are
banking on.

If this is true, then keeping out the obvious license abusers is a good
way of cultivating and maintaining /that/ customer base.

I'm certainly not interested in some pointless argument over this; I
pointed out the article for one reason: it actually addresses part of
the OPs question.