Method for providing a trail period on a program

[Anton Vredegoor]

"Larry Bates" <lbates at swamisoft.com> wrote:

>I find the idea that you can give the software
>away and charge for support an interesting one.
>If you write REALLY good software with REALLY
>good documentation that provides REALLY good
>tracing and debugging support (so users can
>track down their own problems), what are you
>going to charge for?

Maybe give away the previous version of the software but ask some
money if they want to upgrade to the next version? 

If there is yet another new version start giving away the previous
version for free. This way customers are motivated to stimulate
software development processes by their desire to own the latest
upgrade. 

The distinction between support and development of the code is made a
bit less strict and you can use that to provide specialized versions
of the code to those who are willing to pay some more. The
understanding should be that everything they pay for could possibly
end up in the free version after some time. 

I don't know if it would be wise to negotiate about how much time it
would take before other customers will profit from the new features
for free with some paying customer. Maybe some credit messages in the
documentation like "this feature was added thanks to financial support
by customer x" would be a way to appease feelings of injustice.

Anton