Why I don't go PRO

yeahright · #1 (**permalink**) October 22nd, 2003

LimeWire is great. I'm open to the idea of paying for the Pro version and helping to support Lime's efforts, even though I'm only an occasional user.

But, the one thing that bothers me is the "Six months of free upgrades." I wondered what that meant. Would I need to pay some upgrade fee after my six months were up? How much would that be? I couldn't find details on the website, so I searched the boards and found this thread,
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...7&referrerid=0
that says, lemme get this straight, I would need to pay the full price all over again if I ever wanted to upgrade my Pro version after the six months was up.

Of course, as the message says, I can always continue to use the version I had when my time ran out. But, of course, in the rapidly-developing world of peer networking, my Pro copy would show its age very quickly. So I get to pay full price all over again after my MEASLY six months has run out! And then do it again six months later, and again and again and again!

I guess I'm used to the typical practices of shareware licensing, where most authors offer lifetime upgrades (or extremely inexpensive upgrades) as an incentive to register.

I believe that LimePRO would find a wider audience if its licensing terms were not so stingy.

stief · #2 (**permalink**) October 22nd, 2003

I hear you. I'm on my second paid Pro (even though there are equivalent free versions), but I think of it as a donation, not a purchase.

Even though I see here the price has jumped from the USD 9.** I paid to USD 18.88, I'll probably continue to donate--it's a hell of an interesting project, and a pretty cheap hobby.

I donated too to Acquisition when its lifetime price was more than double that of LW's. Still since I figured Acq was ~70% LW, I figured I should donate 4 more times to LW before I had supported both equally. As you can tell from my math, I'm not a MBA.

Shareware is pretty varied in what they ask. I don't know how LW manages to fund all its developers. I can't even see how the 18.88 pays the time of the Pro email supporter.

Anyway, just my CDN $'s worth. If LW looks to be getting greedy or to move away from being an opensource project, I'll drop 'em and go where p2p is about peers helping peers.