The Interactive Geometry Software Cinderella

Forum: Cinderella Support (E)

Forums->Cinderella Support (E)->Licence expiration

Boileau
2 stars
Licence expiration


I just received a copy of Cinderella from my University for evaluating the possibility of acquiring a site license.

Besides the difficulties I encountered when trying to make the software (Macintosh version) accept the licence informations, I am bugged by a more fundamental question: the expiration date of the license. What happens of all the work done by teachers and students if the Cinderella project is ever shut down?

Perhaps it seems a theoritical and futile question to some of you , but this kind of situation happened many times in our institution, and with products that were appently in good health: HyperCard? and Object Logo, to name only two. Fortunately, in those two cases, the license is and will remain valid.

I understand the right of software developers to protect their investment, but not against honest users.

What kind of guarantee can you provide?

André
 
on: Fri 25 of Aug, 2006 [13:57 UTC] reads: 106208

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author message
Boileau
2 stars
Re : Licence expiration
on: Fri 25 of Aug, 2006 [15:58 UTC]
Ulli

Thank you for your quick and usefull answer.

I am just beginning to feel the richness of Cinderella, and I certainly would not want it to disappear! But, being a cautious man, I will surely ask for a pernanent licence for myself.

In the case of extended licences, I fully understand your point of view. In my specific situation, I would not like to train future teachers with softwares which are not available anymore, and I would discontinue the use of Cinderella if it became "extinct". But I would still like to be able to present occasionally past work of my students and myself. In that case, we would use the licence sent by you "on closing" or obtained via Share-IT.

All this seems satisfactory, at least for me!

André

author message
Re: Licence expiration
on: Fri 25 of Aug, 2006 [14:38 UTC]
André,

thank you for sharing this with us, and let me try to answer.

The expiration on the license has been introduced by us in order to be able to invalidate a license if it is made public on the internet. There are other ways of doing this — for example, we could "phone home" and see whether your license has been revoked — but those seem to be much more of an annoyance for the users.

What we are giving back to you is the possibilty to install Cinderella on as many computers as you like, using your license, for your personal use. We think that's fair.

 If you are really concerned about not being able to use Cinderella anymore in the future, please write to support@cinderella.de, and we will issue a license that will not expire. But this is only on special request, again to prevent mis-use of your license.

For the extended school license or the network license we are facing a different situation: Because these are available for all people who have access to your network, and, for the school licenses, you are supposed to give them away to students, we could not stop people who once had access to your network (like former students) to use the license in the future. Again, this could be handled by "branding" your license with more information about the network, for example, but this leads to a much worse user experience than our approach, in our view.

So — back to your question: What is happening if Cinderella vanishes, or the people behind it? Well, first of all I don't think that will happen, but in case we will no longer be available, we will send out permanent licenses before that. If we just vanish (I don't hope so!!), you can ask Share-IT to re-issue the license. The software we gave them will set a new expiry date in the future (end of the year after next year) based on the current date. 

Finally, your mail made me aware that this could be an issue for some people, and we will discuss whether we can find a better solution. If you have any suggestions, I'm happy to hear them!

Ulli



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