Maximus:
It is simple: For I have paid for it, I want to use it, legally.

If it only was that simple. Nowadays you don't become "owner" of a software copy. Actually you own nothing (read the License Agreements that come with most software, they tell you, that you own nothing and have actually no rights whatsoever; then they ask you if that is okay with you and you say "Yes" by clicking "I agree"). You only "license" software. So you actually "bought" nothing, you "licensed" something. What's the difference you'll ask?

If you buy a pizza, you are owner of that pizza. You can do with the pizza what you want, when you want to do it and as often as you wish to do that. Not so with software. Licensing means only you ask for permission and having a license means permission has been granted to you. The permission to use the software.

And a permission can be revoked (unlike your ownership on this yummy pizza). A license can actually be limited to a single computer, a single country (you may not be allowed to use the software outside of the USA for example) or to a limited amount of time (the license is only valid for one year for example). And according to the License Agreements there are usually many situations that allow the vendor to revoke your license.

Link to Windows XP Home LA:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx

Quote:
"The Software is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws and treaties. Microsoft or its suppliers own the title, copyright, and other intellectual property rights in the Software. The Software is licensed, not sold."

That means, unless the EULA explicitely allows you to do something, Microsoft can always change their mind about it. And they clearly say, you license it and it was *not* sold.

Interesting fact: "1.1" says you may not run it on a dual-CPU system. It may only run one processor at any time within a single workstation computer.

However, lucky for you, they "grant" you the right to use and install the software, so you will probably always be able to activate it in the future :) Since most people don't read the EULAs ever, they have no idea how little rights some vendors grant their users.

And I have more (long winded) comment:

If I see the registration process of SmartFTP above, it's like looking in the mirror of our own software registration page. And thus I feel like have some important comments to make.

Assume you have a software with a certain set of features. Features don't come out of nowhere. Implementing features cost time and time is money. Now what to do if a couple of customers, usually those who have already bought the product, request for a certain missing feature?

You could simply ignore them. Why would care for them? They have already bought the product; you already made your money, so why not ignoring them? With that attitude your app will stay the same till the end of time: Take it as it is or leave it.

But we are software developers. We want to add features. We want the application to develop and we want to make customers happy, don't we? So we implement the feature. Sometimes a small one, but sometimes one that involves three programmers, two months of coding, one month of testing and debugging, leaving aside the fact that someone needs to update the manual, the webpage, the FAQ, products guides, data sheets and so on and so on and so on. All these people get salary, all of them wants to have a car, a house/flat, food on their table and pay their monthly bills. If they had not spent all this time on this stupid feature, they could have written new software in that time, software that can be sold and software that will pay their bills.

What they have done is writing software that is going to give them zero revenue. Just because this one feature has been added, the software sales will not increase dramatically (this is only true for a very small amount of features). So how are they going to get any revenue for all their work?

One possibility could be to only release the feature in a new version of the app and make this a paid upgrade. That would be pretty silly. Only the customers that asked for the feature before might buy this upgrade. All the other customers will say "Hey, why should I pay for an upgrade that offers one or more new features I never needed in the first place?". Also we would be forced to release paid upgrades every couple of months. That just isn't going to work.

Another idea would be to sell this feature separately. However, after two years, you go to the store to buy the product and then you are shown a list with 200 possible add-on features (each of them has their price) and you shall decide which of these you want to buy together with your license. 200 features, 100 of those where you don't even have the smallest idea what in the world this might even be, 50 where you can't say for sure if you need these or not, etc. This will surely annoy and piss off your customers.

Using editions has nothing to do with the fact whether your customers are rich or poor. Editions are used because

1. Not every user will need every feature. Why making user pay for the development of a feature, they never wanted in the first place? And if we'd really calculate the time of all feature development of all added features together and need to sell that for a price where we know for sure, we'll get really paid for the actual work, the product will cost $300 or more.

2. Instead of having customers to pick individual features, you look at "Who are your customers actually?" and "What are they using your product for?" and "Which of the available features do they really need for these tasks?". Based on this, you group sets of features together - and every such set is an edition.

3. Since customers can upgrade from one edition to another one, such a kind of upgrade (pay for more features, if you need them) makes more sense than having them upgrade to newer versions because only newer versions contain a new set of features (despite the fact that this is unfair: Old customers need to buy an upgrade to get these new features, new customers buy the new version and get all the features at once without any extra payment).

There are only two main problems with editions, two problems we are facing ourselves (unfortunately I don't decide about which feature goes into which edition):

I) It's unfair towards your customers if you charge for features arbitrarily. E.g. if a new feature is added and this feature adds to new abilities to the program, saying that only in the more expensive editions both abilities are available and only one of them is in the less expensive ones is basically cheating. The feature was adding both abilities, the price for both abilities equals the price for either one. Having customers charged to get something that was not causing you any additional costs is unfair, would you disagree? For SmartFTP, it's really doubtful that SFTP over SSH was really something that caused a lot of additional development time. It's rather one of these features where marketing says "You can't give this to customers for free, it's too valuable".

II) Editions make little sense if they don't represent the average use case of your customers. The set of features per edition needs to be sound. If there is one edition that almost perfectly fits my use case, but there is one feature I really need and this feature is missing in my edition, but present in the next more expensive one (together with 300 other features I don't care for), I'm forced to buy the more expensive one, just to get this one stupid feature. If the editions are so horribly unbalanced, you will always end up in the most expensive one to get the necessary features and then you could as well just sell the product as this edition only. This is the problem Windows Vista is suffering from. Important features that we use in business every day have been left out of the business edition for example.

Surely it's always easy to do it as Apple does: Sell MacOS X as one edition with all features for one price. However, if we do it like that, either we need to sell the product for at least $200 to keep it profitable, or will make loss and sooner or later stop the development of the product altogether and rather continue with other applications.