We’re asked, every so often, why we don’t offer a time-limited full version of SuperDuper!.
It’s pretty simple, really.
If you’re going to time-limit a program, you have three choices:
- “Cookie" the user’s system in some hidden way so you know when the program was first run, and can therefore calculate when you’re supposed to expire.
- Automatically identify the system and phone home, asking some server when the copy should expire, and not allowing execution without internet access
- Force the user to provide personal information, including an email address, so that you can give them a key that expires (and the key, which need not be hidden, can contain the “cookie")
The first, in my opinion, is right out. I hate it when programs hide things on my system, and while I understand why they do it (see above), it’s just the wrong thing to do, especially for a backup program. A backup program that writes hidden stuff to the source volume? I don’t think so.
The second is nasty for obvious reasons.
The third, while doable, forces users to announce themselves to me when they just want to evaluate the software. We’re very conscious of privacy here, and a lot of people are understandably touchy about this kind of thing. The last thing we wanted to do was to alienate them right out of the gate, and force them to register just to take a look.
So, given those not-so-good choices, we decided to:
- Provide useful, free functionality in the unregistered version of SuperDuper!, including technical support and full documentation
- Never “expire” or take away the free functionality we’ve provided, even in future versions
- Offer an evaluation key, on request, for users who want to examine its full capability (all we ask is that you drop us a note and tell us what you thought)
So, now you know! I think this has proven to be a good compromise, and while it doesn’t satisfy everyone… what does?
