I have to say that Michael's license is extremely generous and IMO the absolute best way to work with software-- license it to a person, not a computer. A few other companies, like Adobe and MS, have done a similar licensing scheme only making it a tad bit harder as it needs to "phone home" occasionally to make sure it's licensed and only working on maximum 2 machines (they can be ANY 2 machines and change from time to time as the user desires).
Others, like KeyShot make it a bit more difficult as they force you to "delicense" a machine before licensing another-- and this becomes a problem if you 'forgot' to do that and are on the road wanting to use KS and finding out you forgot to delicense your machine at home.
And finally, there are the difficult ones, like Vray, who have the antiquated licensing model forcing you to use a physical copy protection dongle attached to your computer. If you lose it, your literally screwed as there's a HUGE set of hoops you have to jump through just to get a new one, and there is always a charge.
I'm not a fan at all of the dongle, as years ago I had a similar dongle for a now defunct company, let's call them Image Electric (IE), and my dongle quit working in the middle of a very important project. Took them 2 days to send me a new one AFTER I sent them back the damaged one. A week after I received the new one, I got a letter from their lawyer telling me they were going to sue me for tampering with their dongle! I couldn't believe it. A week later, another letter appeared saying they had discovered a virus had infected my hard disk and it was the virus which killed the dongle and they were sorry. I immediately switched to a different company and never looked back. Paying customers should not be treated as criminals.
I later heard IE sued ILM as ILM used IE on a project and IE calculated how many hours it would take to render the various scenes and concluded ILM didn't have the correct number of dongles. Talk about customer UN-FRIENDLY! Eventually they lost their whole customer base as nobody wanted to work with their product and the company had to shut down.
Another interesting story, the CEO of the long gone IE went to work years later at Newtek as the head of Lightwave. I know the CEO of Newtek and sent him an email and warned him of this guy. I immediately quit using Lightwave and a couple years later the guy was fired and I started using Lightwave again. Ugh.
Thanks Michael for being so reasonable!
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