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Comment by doozy | Hacker News Reader

Many moons ago I developed a moderately successful shareware program. My licensing terms were simple: If you owned the computer where you installed and used it no license was needed, but if someone else owned the machine, you owed me money.

It allowed students, hobbyists and freelancers to use the software for free, for any purpose, but companies, institutions and governments had to pay to play.

This idea does not seem to translate in an obvious way to software released under an open source license.

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Interesting idea, but two things struck me here:

1. Does that mean a student would have to pay to install it on their school computer? Or maybe a school provided laptop?

2. What about personal installs for other people? Not as a business or service, but merely on a friend or relative's computer?

Because in theory, both of those would come under 'someone else owning the machine', but they'd also be seen as personal usage by any rational person.

I agree with the first, but the second doesn't qualify. If the person using the software (a friend) owns the computer where the software is installed (my friend's computer) he qualifies for the free license. I don't think it matters who actually did the installation.

You'll always have a corner case or another. I wouldn't care about personal usage users.

Case 2 clearly falls into the free usage policy, but in case 1 if the school is requiring students to install this software in their school-provided hardware as a way of sidestepping licensing fees I think they are stretching it a bit.

I love the idea, but can't help wondering: did it actually convert into "sales"?

As I said, it was a moderately successful side business. I know of many cases in which the sale came from someone buying this on behalf of his employer years after he had first used the software as a student.

I was never after the nickles and dimes of users, always had my eyes in the deep pockets of major players. 99% of my sales came from multi-billion dollar corporations, universities and government.

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