Ideas

This could really work in a corporate environment. Only problem might be with EULAs and copyright, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV either.

i think that this idea will make alota trouble and not alota money, for example when a person is using this software and has a limited time as u say, hav u ever thought that the PC can shut down at any second for some reason and then the user wants to reuse that software and doesnt find and more time in his account for technical reasons, it can be easily sued for these reasons and it wouldnt make alot of money, cause wht like aperson wants to spend 5 dollers for and hour? doesnt make sence.. wat if he needs to use it after, wt he should gop and pay onother 5 dollers, a person who has good logic wouldnt do such a thing.. good luck with it programer

In response to lu>

It wouldn't be $5 for an hour - that sort of thing obviously wouldn't work. Many software companies lease their software (IBM, Microsoft, Mercury to name a few).

The price would more likely be based on a daily or weekly rate.

Also, the client software that would control the licensing could record how long the user actually used the application for, in order to mitigate problems with non-usage.

Finally, you are thinking that *you* would be the target market. You wouldn't be. The target market is people who _need_ to use some piece of software for a commercial reason. For example, a friend of mine who runs an IT service company recently rented some movie conversion software for two weeks to a media company that needed it. It was much cheaper for that media company to rent it than to buy it, and they only needed it for two weeks.

A great tweak on this would be remote Virtual Machines --
A user would rent time on a machine with particular programs --
so they'd then VNC or remote desktop into it, and use the program.
At any time you could cut off their access to it, and then no more software licensing issues -- they never had to download or install any of the software anyway.

Its a VM -- just reset it to the state before the user got in -- ready to be rented again!

Some public libraries rent software already, but they just hand out discs instead of using the net.

You'll have to have heavy DRM to have it just be internet-enabled, which 1. won't work and 2. will require you to get permission from each company. Discs may be a better idea than downloads, though I'll admit that's soooo 20th century.

Relatedly, there's Gamefly.com, which is Netflix for video games.

Perhaps then LogicX's idea is better - creating VMs on the fly for people to work from? Or having a bunch of "stock" VMs that are reinstalled after a user is finished?

The downside with that approach is it is harder for people with lots of content and/or low bandwidth.

The DRM part is the key. Making that watertight would probably be hard.

In response to "The Author"
havent you thought of how a client can actually run a program or a software that is not installed on their PC or system. Simply the nice _client_ can downlaod that software onto his PC and then return that CD or whatever back to the company. it wouldnt make sence right? or maybe it would to *you*..Piracy can be easily spread then, so i duno wht u think...

I know Bigpond are currently doing something like this with games, allowing users to download a game then play it for an hour for free (the expectation being that if you like it you will buy it) but im not sure how they are doing it.

I like the VM concept, but if their access is terminated before they get their data off... Perhaps a combination ofd the two, with the client side holding the user data and feeding it to the vm as temp data? although again, an absolute pain to work with.