Trial Licenses
A trial license is a temporary license that remains valid for the number of days or hours specified. Trial licenses are quite popular amongst software vendors and customers because of the following benefits:
>Trial licenses provide a convenient way for customers to evaluate your product when they are making their purchase decisions.
>When a trial license is exhausted, your customers can buy a normal license or add up more trial licenses for further access to your software without re-installing it.
>Trial licenses allow time-limited or usage-based billing of your software. The customers who need your product for short duration can buy a suitably priced trial license, rather than a regular normal license.
>You do not need to create different copies or editions of your software for normal and trial licenses (unless you are including different features in the two editions).
>Providing a different license (a trial or normal license) itself will ensure that only associated functionality is delivered.
>Trial licenses have built-in security to discourage licensing violations or reuse of the same license, like system clock tampering or re-installation of the software.
In this chapter we will discuss the following topics: