🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <sheldon.726806659@pv1413.vincent.iastate.edu> sheldon@iastate.edu (Steve Sheldon) writes:
>In <syny.726700502@crux1.cit.cornell.edu> syny@crux3.cit.cornell.edu (R Craig Stevenson) writes:
>
>>> What is the difference between disabling a feature and offering an
>>> additional feature upon registration, just a few words?
>
>>Let's put semantics aside.  There are (at least) 3 methods commonly
[Stuff gone]
>
>>1) disable a central feature.  For example, you can try our editor,
>>but you can't save and files; you can try our database, but your
>>limited to 50 records per database.  The goal is to allow you to try
>>the software out, but to render it useless for any *real* work.


FoxBase+ used a technique similar to the above, which I think many other
commercial products could emulate (will Microsoft do it with FoxPro? :).

They didn't disable a feature, they just limited it to begin.  The buyer
was given two "activation codes", one implemented a restricted version of
the program the other implemented the full bottle.  The whole point was
that you could *try* the program with a subset of your actual data and
application.  If you didn't like what it did, you could return
it to Fox and get a refund, provided that you hadn't used the full
activation code.

I can't see any problem with shareware authors adopting similar tactics.
*Provided* that the "crippling" doesn't give a false impression
of what the program can really do - as it might if a database worked
nicely with only 2000 records, for example; but slowed to a crawl in
a real world application requiring swapping to disk to handle large
sets of data.



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