You can take a look at a couple IBM examples for inspiration such as:
- Enterprise COBOL Developer Trial
- CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Developer Trial
Another possibility available for certain types of products is to provide
Internet access (preferably via an encrypted connection) to an evaluation
system. Create an ID for the evaluator (or multiple IDs for multiple
evaluators) and let them take a spin. Then disable the IDs after a warning
period. That avoids much of the hassle of supporting evaluations.
"Watermarking" ("Licensed to ACME Corporation, Contract ACME001") is an
interesting idea, though I think the best place to put watermarks is in
logs, traces, dumps, etc. that a customer would sometimes submit for
support purposes.
I'm a big fan of sub-capacity licensing terms, and that tends to help
support evaluations. Many potential customers are willing to license, say,
3 MSUs for one month for a relatively small amount of money before
committing to 300 MSUs. If you've got the license agreement in place, it's
then straightforward to increase the quantity on that basis.
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Timothy Sipples
VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore)
E-Mail: [email protected]
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