Protection and More

This sections expands on additional uses of dongles in the domain of software marketing and forward-looking sales.

Dongles are first and foremost intended for protection of software. However, potential capabilities of the current software-and-hardware protection provide an opportunity to use them for implementation of marketing strategy of a software manufacturer. Let us have a look at some options of such non-standard usage.

Demo Versions
Using dongles, you can easily create demo versions of software products without having to write a demo version of the program. You can easily distribute copies and disable or limit some capabilities of the program that can be activated only with the dongle. Or, you can offer a fully functional program to the users as a trial version having limited the number of its executions.

Rent and Lease
The license term of a fully functional non-demo version of the program is first limited and then the program is offered to the user. As soon as the user installs a regular payment, the license term of his program is prolonged by means of remote reprogramming of the dongle's memory.

Selling the Software by Components (Selling by Modules)
In case a program consists of several components (for instance, the program is an electronic interpreter comprising several language pairs), you may include all modules in the package to be shipped, yet activate only the purchased modules. At any time the customer, if he so desires, can pay for an additional program component, which will be activated by means of remote reprogramming of the dongle.

Licensing in LANs
In this case licensing means exercising control over the number of software copies being used. How is licensing effected? Let us imagine that the user is going to install some program in the network. At the time of purchasing, he indicates the number of copies of software that he needs, and is granted a corresponding license. The manufacturer hands the distributive and an accordingly programmed dongle over to the customer. Now the user can work with the number of copies for which he has paid.