Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2003 5:26 pm

During the recent eLicense outage, a zMUD customer emailed me and made a very interesting suggestion. He was wondering if there was an unlimited license for zMUD available that did not auto-expire every 90 days.

Now, as we have mentioned many times, the 90-day auto-renewal was added for the protection of your licenses. Without this auto-renewal, any license lost by a Windows crash or hard disk format when you were not able to Unlicense first or forgot to unlicense would be lost. So, unless you were careful, you might use up all 3 licenses and start getting Code 17 errors.

However, even with this understanding, it seems that some people might be interested in this. I don't really want to encourage everyone to get one of these licenses, so as the customer suggested, I'd probably charge more for this.

So, my idea is this:
1) Have an unlimited license available.
2) Make the customer "agree" multiple times to the terms stating that if you forget to unlicense you might lost your licenses.
3) Set a policy to only manually recover a license (code 17) up to 3 times a year.
4) 30-day refunds would not be allowed. Otherwise people could buy an unlimited license, then get a refund and still be able to use the program.
5) Make it expensive to prevent all users from selecting this option (which would increase our support cost). I'm thinking of something like $39.95 for this unlimited license.

Unfortunately, I don't see any way to offer any sort of discount for existing zMUD users. I've sent an email to eLicense to see what kinds of things their system will support. I'd like to just have two sets of reg codes with a single zMUD download. But it might also require having a seperate version of zMUD that is wrapped differently than the 90-day version.

How much interest is there in this kind of idea? I don't want to go to the trouble of figuring out how to do this if nobody else would care about it.

I'm going to be gone this weekend, so please post your comments and discuss this topic amounst yourselfs. On Monday I'll take a look at the results of this thread and the response I get from eLicense to determine what I can do and what you want me to do.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

To be honest, I don't mind auto-renewing every now and then. Its pretty well known by now that you need to uninstall a lisence if you reformat or move to a different PC. Having 3 lisenses makes it easy to deal with the problem of a crash occuring.

Also, looking out for Zugg because I want to see Zmud and Zmapper continue to grow. I would be very worried about giving out unlimited lisenses. Somebody will buy 1 of these and you will end up with hundreds of people using this one code. I think there is too much risk of people abusing the code by giving it out to all thier friends. Unless elisense has some very good way of dealing with this, I would not suggest it.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

If the score of license sharing is covered then I am all for an unlimited license option being available. I personally only do driver and system updates once a year, and produce a full backup first (DriveImage Pro is great). Of course I would be happy to purchase both types of licenses, but then I don't think I am the typical user. On the same note of purchasing many licenses, I think if I was stupid enough to use up all the licenses I have already purchased in the 90 day period then I would just buy more.

As to the other issue an unlimited license would address...that of network outages/maintainence downtime; I can not see that the cost/benefit ratio would be worth it. Those type of things will happen occasionally for any business, and a professional outfit will do everything they can to minimize them. I am sure that eLicense will learn from recent events and improve. So that just leaves operator error to be the only deciding factor. I think the current system is proven to cover operator error reasonably, so there is no reason to make the effort to create a second licensing method.

Apprentice Joined: 29 May 2002 Posts: 121

I prefer not having the unlimited license feature because it is possible to reverse engineer or find a loop hole some how in a product to bypass the license.

It happens with games and other software products on the market, so I would think it would happen with Zmud. The 3 licenses is not that difficult to work with and you can always setup an off-line license so that if the server is ever down, you will still be able to license the product. That is at least what I have understood from the register feature just haven't gotten it to work on their website yet.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I wouldn't buy an unlimited license, I think the 90 day renewal is a safety net I wouldn't do without.

I do have another proposal, though.

Enable a 5-day renewal grace period, so when your copy expires you can demo it for 5 days before it refuses to run again. So basically when it comes up saying "Zmud has expired." We have two options "Renew Now", or "Renew Later" with a 5 day time-out.

I would have serious doubts if elicense would manage to have a 5 day outage ever :)

Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:38 am

quote:
Originally posted by Rainchild

I wouldn't buy an unlimited license, I think the 90 day renewal is a safety net I wouldn't do without.

I do have another proposal, though.

Enable a 5-day renewal grace period, so when your copy expires you can demo it for 5 days before it refuses to run again. So basically when it comes up saying "Zmud has expired." We have two options "Renew Now", or "Renew Later" with a 5 day time-out.

I would have serious doubts if elicense would manage to have a 5 day outage ever :)

I gotta agree completely with this, the 5-day grace period would be exceedingly useful for times when there was an outage, and I'm not sure how much of a personal fan I'd be of an unlimited license. They sound appealing, however, I like the added security of the 90-day license. It's not THAT difficult to click "renew" once every 3 months is it? *hell, people usually winde up clicking the close button on more advertisements than that ;)*

Just my $0.02... But I completely agree with Rainchild on this one

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

quote:
Originally posted by Rainchild

I wouldn't buy an unlimited license, I think the 90 day renewal is a safety net I wouldn't do without.

I do have another proposal, though.

Enable a 5-day renewal grace period, so when your copy expires you can demo it for 5 days before it refuses to run again. So basically when it comes up saying "Zmud has expired." We have two options "Renew Now", or "Renew Later" with a 5 day time-out.

I would have serious doubts if elicense would manage to have a 5 day outage ever :)

Rainchild's suggestion is truly the way to go in my opinion. Create a license renewal window of five or even fourteen days. Or just allow user-initiated renewal after day 85. Some people will put it off until the last minute and then try to complain when network issues pop up but truly, zugg bends over backwards for his customers and this would be one instance where he could/should just laugh at them.

Magician Joined: 25 Oct 2000 Posts: 461 Location: USA

I agree with the above posters, 5-day 'elicense dead' saftey net (starting at day 85) instead of an unlimited license. Even though I clearly know that zmud should be unregged before wiping out Windows, that doesn't mean I ever remember to do it. I rely on the 3-license 90-day cycle so I don't screw it up!

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

I also like the 5 day renew grace period. Seems this is the best way to go if its possible. If not, I say leave things as they are.

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2003 9:27 pm

I'll contact eLicense and ask them to add the "grace period" to their to-do list. In the current eLicense implementation, there is no way to do a 5-day grace period, but it's a good idea and I'm sure they'll give it consideration.

The "unlimited" option is actually easy to implement. It doesn't open up any sort of loop-hole that we can determine. You would still ONLY have 3 licenses. The "unlimited" just eliminates the clicking the renew button every 90 days. It does not give you an unlimited number of licenses or anything like that. So, this is really just for people who don't want to bother clicking the Renew button every 90 days, or the paranoid people who are worried about eLicense going away or anything like that.

The only *real* advantage to the Unlimited would be for people using zMUD on a local network where it is a pain to renew every 90 days because they are not connected to the Internet. Corporate networks, military networks, and customers like that who currently must use the Offline method to do the licensing might benefit from this. But I'm not sure how many people really need this.

Anyway, keep your feedback on this topic coming. It's pretty easy to do on my end if people really want it. But it *does* require a change to the eLicense wrapper in zMUD, so it's not something I could do until the next version of zMUD anyway, and it wouldn't work with any past versions.

MASTER Joined: 28 Nov 2000 Posts: 4817 Location: USA

I'm satisfied with knowing I can easily retrieve lost licenses by simply waiting for them to auto-expire, but I have no objection to one-time licenses as another option for the people who think it's somehow demeaning to renew. Considering how passionate some of those people were in their initial complaints, I'm disappointed that none of them responded in favor of the one-time licenses.

Rainday's suggestion of a grace period is interesting, but it sounds like something that would require eLicense to rewrite their software rather than something that could be easily implemented with their existing program. It's certainly worth suggesting to them, though.

Anyone who really wants a grace period can easily unlicense and then relicense at a time of their own choice. I'm considering doing so myself to avoid any chance that eLicense's servers will be down when I HAVE to relicense.

Newbie Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 2 Location: USA

I like the system we have now.. I mean it, after all, I have had to contact Zugg several times in the past after mishaps with my computers. I like the elicense as is, but at the same time, if you plan to go ahead with it, I hope that we don't have to pay for anymore surcharges if we are existing customers

Beginner Joined: 15 Feb 2003 Posts: 14 Location: USA

<rant>
I apologize in advance for the long winded post. All spelling and grammar mistakes are intentional and should be considered part of the creative license.

Zugg, First off, I would never want to deny you the ability to defend your livelyhood but I would like to ask a question since we are on the subject. I am sure you are aware there are “hacked” versions of your Software out there. Other than outright theft that is also a testament to the popularity of your program. Regardless of that, investing time and efforts on safeguarding and protecting your livelihood in what I am sure is an exceedingly demanding schedule would seem arduous. But at some point are there not diminishing returns?

I have to deal with hardware rainbow locks, registration codes and generally all forms of electronic property rights protection in my day-to-day job. And honestly all of those things amounted to a stumbling blocks only for the people who were strive to be legal and truthful to the agreements. An allegory used at a SANS Conference I attended went something like “That’s like putting a steel safe door to secure a cardboard box.”

Let me hopefully convey my thought with a real life example. The company I work for uses an automated attendant and call center software that is secured by a hardware encryption lock that works off the parallel port. So it checks for the presents of the keylock at boot and then proceeds when it is found. It aborts and refuses to load if no lock or the wrong lock is installed. Apparently it had been up for months not requiring a system restart and was working fine. One power outage that lasted over and hour and thirty minutes overcame the UPS for the phone system. It was shortly there-after (a few calls to tech support) I discovered the parallel port no longer worked. This was a Friday evening and our tech support was virtually down till mid-day Tuesday. However, a replacement motherboard was overnighted from the west coast. What got to me really wasn’t that a hard drive or a stick of memory or any PBX board that kept the phone system unavailable it was an unnecessary security measure contraption in my opinion. In other words an additional and unnecessary point of failure was introduced and worsened the value of an otherwise superior product.

I am sure this was very expensive software. I believed we paid way over 25K for it. I am also sure it has been illegally copied regardless. The monies and effort diverted to implement the security protection I feel would have been better spent on product maintenance and enhancements. I have no clue to how much this security saved revenue but it did cost them at least one former client. I am pretty sure there are people who could duplicate that particular key. I recall an unofficial patch offered on a BBS (oh the nostalgia), which striped out that code but voided your support warranty and license agreement at the same time.

Now, with that said, I have never personally been prevented from getting to my muds for a legitimate reason that had to do with zmud’s security. But the possibility is there for it to happen. Do you have any data on how sales increased before and after you implemented the current security?

I still thank you for many, many, late nights mudding with the best mud client (period).

</rant>
<flame suite on>

Beginner Joined: 01 Sep 2002 Posts: 27

Why not just put the software back into "30 day free trial" mode when the license expires? It would allow people who have the misfortune to have their licenses expire during an elicense outage to still use the software.

Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 7:40 pm

I think I've gotten the feedback that I was looking for, so I'm going to remove this topic from the "sticky" list for now. Thanks for adding your opinions to this topic. At this point, I'm not going to make any changes to the current licensing method.

But to answer a couple of questions from the last couple of posts:

1) There have been no cracks of zMUD that I am aware of since v6.40 was released. This was an update to the eLicense system that prevented the proxy hacks that were used previously on v6.16. All I can do (or all eLicense can do) is try to update their software when new hacks are found. Because the eLicense system relies on an external database that hackers cannot control, this system *CAN* be secure. Obviously I can't do anything about past versions. What I can do is continue to add functionality to zMUD so that people want to use the latest version which is much harder to hack.

The sales increase due to the implementation of eLicense is very noticeable. I can't really quote an exact percentage, because it's hard to determine it exactly, but it's something like a 30% increase in registrations (+- 10% or so). On top of that, using eLicense freed up the many hours I used to spend working on my own copy protection and has allowed me to focus on zMUD features rather than security. It is very obvious to me given my sales data that without switching to eLicense, zMUD would have been dead several years ago. So, rather than flaming eLicense, customers who have enjoyed the new features added to zMUD in the last few years should be praising eLicense for saving zMUD.

And to answer Rieper's last question, allowing the software to revert to a 30-day trial would put a hole in the eLicense protection that could be easily exploited to allow hackers to keep getting a new 30-day trial and never pay for it. With the current system, once the 30-day trial runs out, there is absolutely no way to reset it, and that's the way we want it.

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 873 Location: USA

quote:
Originally posted by Zugg
The only *real* advantage to the Unlimited would be for people using zMUD on a local network where it is a pain to renew every 90 days because they are not connected to the Internet.

Just wanted to note that I sometimes fall into that category, but the new offline license facility does everything I need. It's a vast improvement over a year or two ago.

Note for anyone who hadn't noticed: you can now do copy/paste of a text block and get an answer text block from their website. Easy to use even by floppy.

I do hope that eLicense responds favorably to the suggestion for early nagging to renew.

-Tarn

Adept Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 224 Location: USA

The never expire liscence is ok, but honestly, most peopel who use zmud have an internet connection, and it does not take 30 seconds to renew your liscence (at least in my case). I like the idea of not having to freak out if my computer screws up, because the liscence will run out and i can use it again.

From the way some people had posted (not in this thread, so please, dont flame and respond all harshly) I think they didn't want to have to renew their liscence because they wanted somewhat of a cd key, and they could install it wherever and whenever they wanted.

Anyway, I will stick with the 3 liscence, expiration version. I will deal with the very rare chance of a network outage and wait a day or two to renew my liscence.

TIP**** I ahve zmud installed on two different harddrives, each one a month apart, so if something happens with a drive, or eliscence is down, i can still mud!

Great product zugg, keep up the wonderful work.

LightBulb should be a zMUD Guru I think. He is a friggin zmud genius! That is way off topic though. Might get edited out.

Apprentice Joined: 16 Dec 2002 Posts: 103

Of course, nobody mentions that the e-license software forces the periodic licensing in order to track usage habits. I personally find it annoying that I have to report whether or not I'm using my software every 3 months. Amazing how much crap Microsoft got for forcing a _ONE_TIME_ registration on a $90+ product, and how little Zugg gets for zMud.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

quote:
Originally posted by hatespyware

Of course, nobody mentions that the e-license software forces the periodic licensing in order to track usage habits. I personally find it annoying that I have to report whether or not I'm using my software every 3 months. Amazing how much crap Microsoft got for forcing a _ONE_TIME_ registration on a $90+ product, and how little Zugg gets for zMud.

That is because Microsoft's system is worse. It is locked to your hardware so if you upgrade chances are Windows will cease to work. Atleast if you have the Home edition. If you reinstall Windows by wiping the harddrive I am unsure it will allow you to reregister.

Of course Zuggsoft is tracking YOUR mud habits and spying on YOU Very Happy

Adept Joined: 30 Jan 2003 Posts: 228 Location: USA

Is anyone aware that at any time you can call Elicense and with an apparent -touch of thier button- while your on the phone with them they can reset all 3 licenses for you. Ive had to do this several times as Im a frequent fan of Formatting and Im also a frequent fan of Not unlicensing Zmud, But this option seems to work rather well for me, It means I dont havta wait and also Zugg doesnt havta waste his time dealing with my stupidity instead of making the program better! The only problem I've come across is those people at E-License dont seem to wanna be there at 1 am in the morning when I get around to reformatting my HDD and slapping windows back on it, darn people, they must have lives or something *shrug*

Apprentice Joined: 16 Dec 2002 Posts: 103

Another important factor, although I know mentioning it is stirring a bees' nest... zMud is destined to die eventually. I can't speak for all of you, but I have purchased one single set of licenses, and plan to give Zugg no more money whatsoever for zMud or derivative works. While there may be some of you that do indeed donate money or purchase additional licenses that you do not need, the product will nonetheless eventually cease to make money. It is very clear that Zugg will disappear along with his profits, at least insofar as zMud is concerned. Consider… what the software really needs, or will eventually need, is a complete rewrite. Whether or not you believe that the zMud code-base is a patch-as-you-go mess of spaghetti-code, you must at least concede that the existing framework will have to be reworked eventually to support changing hardware/OS/etc demands. Do you really think that Zugg is ever going to give a complete rewrite away? No – his promise to provide free upgrades forever will prove to be untenable, and he will be forced to either continue unbundling portions of the software, as in the zMud mapper (ala zMapper) or scrap the whole project altogether. Now… what does that have to do with e-licensing? Well, what happens when Zuggsoft is no more and Via decides to start charging for their software support services? What is to say that they can’t levy an additional service charge for your software license renewals? What happens when your support calls for relicensing after an OS reinstall now carry a hefty service charge? What if… ? The bottom line is that e-licensing is not in _my_ best interest. I suspect that the same is true for most of you, too. Given an opportunity to permanently e-license once isn’t a very attractive alternative, either, since you are still subject to hassles when reinstalling your operating system or other similar scenarios. I, personally, believe that the only reason that it is being suggested as an alternative is so that Zugg can try to maneuver himself into a position of being able to gain more revenue. Also not in _my_ best interest.

Adept Joined: 30 Dec 2001 Posts: 220 Location: Canada

EEP! Your scaring me hatespyware =(

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

quote:
I can't speak for all of you, but I have purchased one single set of licenses, and plan to give Zugg no more money whatsoever for zMud or derivative works. While there may be some of you that do indeed donate money or purchase additional licenses that you do not need, the product will nonetheless eventually cease to make money. It is very clear that Zugg will disappear along with his profits, at least insofar as zMud is concerned.

I'll give you your money back if you'll disappear. No joke. Provide proof that your licenses are unusable and I'll pay you to go away. If you don't believe me, email Seamer as to how serious I am. Afterall, I hate to see people suffer with the consequences of their delusions.

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

quote:
Of course, nobody mentions that the e-license software forces the periodic licensing in order to track usage habits. I personally find it annoying that I have to report whether or not I'm using my software every 3 months.

And.... topic locked!
Don't spread misinformation alright? Also, we don't appreciate trolling in here, so don't go about "stirring the bee's nest". Next time, the eLicense trojan will format your hard drive (just in case, I'm not serious - neither zMUD nor eLicense install any spyware nor do they monitor your usage.)

Incredible how some people will degrade otherwise normal topics into this. That delete user button was so close....