This section lists some, but far from all, ways of providing your potential customers with demo versions of your software. Depending on the level of protection you need, you can choose a method that you may want to employ; in some cases you may want to use a single method, whereas sometimes combining multiple methods will provide the best possible protection for your application.
| Method | Description |
|---|---|
| Trial Licenses | LM-X trial licenses let end users use an application for a specified period of time without requiring a license. The use of trial licenses can be limited by a number of days (see LMX_OPT_TRIAL_DAYS in LMX_SetOption) and/or the number of checkouts allowed (see LMX_OPT_TRIAL_USES in LMX_SetOption). Note: When running a trial license, you can gather useful feedback information by using LM-X API functions such as LMX_GetExpireTime and LMX_Checkout. |
| Restricted Usage | LM-X makes it easy to restrict application functionality for trial use. Simply omit some or all features from the license file that you distribute. Since the feature is not specified in the license file, the corresponding module in your application will be unavailable to the user. As an alternative, you might wish to introduce a DEMO feature, which would give only partial access to the application. |
| Visual Reminders | You might wish to encourage full licensing of your software by having your program show a popup periodically or when the license is a few days from expiration.You can also implement such means as switching the position of a button users must press to continue opening the demo version. |
| Watermarks | You may not want your prospective customers to use a demo version of your application for distribution or publication purposes. To discourage such use, you can add watermarks to printed output; for example, by superimposing “EVALUATION” in large text on printed pages. |
| Trial Usage | You can prohibit the use of trial licenses on virtual machines. Note that licenses are not allowed to run on virtual machines by default. (See Licensing for virtual machines and cloud computing for more information.) Note: There are specific API calls for disabling use of trial licenses on virtual machines, as described in Trial licenses. |