My take on: Trial Software Expiration.


Recalling a previous void post that mention a nice piece of software call Ecto, I would like to spun off today's post out of that.

You see Ecto, a blogging management application of sorts, has a 3 weeks trial and it has just expired. To say the least this pisses me off, because for the most part its a great app, yet truth be told, I don't have the $ to actually pay for it. Sure I could re-download it, but it gets tedious doing this every 3 weeks. Look for a serial, but then again, I don't want to steal the effort the guys put into making the thing by going to some random site with banners showing chicks without their panties on and getting a serial. Probably end up been registered to RaYbeZzL33tk1d, and that's not even my name..

See that's the issue with time trials, you get teased, then it gets taken away. A great way to get you hooked on the product, no doubt about it, but at the same time should you want to explore the product's full features you kinda go..

"Why am I doing this, if in X amount of time it will be useless, and I would have to either re-enter everything, re-download it, or just give up on it"


I would rather have a Free version of a give app..crippled, stripped away of its "selling features" available for use. BBEdit does it with Text Wrangler, I believe more software companies could indeed follow that example. If you are indeed in need of the extra features, or really like the software, people will buy it. I would buy Ecto, when I have the means to do it, but in the mean time I don't believe in re-downloading it over and over again. Worse thing could be just getting a random serial, hey for once I'm trying to be honest here *hides away Adobe products*.

So there you have it, time expiration sucks, Lighterr-free versions of apps is the way to go. If you are an Ecto developer, would you mind sparing out a license to your great app? Thanks in advance.

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Published:
10/17/2005 11:13:00 PM
by Sebastian